UNIVERSITY  C 
AT    LOS 


MODERN  POETS 

AND 

CHRISTIAN  TEACHING 


SIDNEY  LANIER 

BY 

HENRY  NELSON  LSNYDER 


NEW  YORK:    EATON  &  MAINS 
CINCINNATI:  JENNINGS  &  GRAHAM 


Copyright,  1906,  by 
EATON  &  MAINS. 


s 

CONTENTS 


PAGE 

o  Note  ___-_--7 

0? 

t^          I. — Sir  Galahad     -------9 

£j         II. — In  the  Artist's  Thought        -        -        -        -         28 

CO 

III. — The  Song  of  the  Poet — His  Mission  and  Service  47 

IV. — With  Nature                                                    -        -  64 

V. — The  Poet  and  His  Age  -         -        -        -        -  74 

VI.— God  in  the  World    -                                                 -  83 

VII. — The  Gospel  of  Love    -  i°o 

VIII.— The  Crystal  Christ                                                  -  122 

IX.— The  Message      ------  126 


* 


353175 


NOTE 

THIS  volume  is  not  to  be  received  as  a  biogra 
phy  of  Sidney  Lanier.  It  is  rather  an  attempt  to 
interpret  adequately  and  sympathetically  the  mes 
sage  of  the  man  and  his  works — a  message  sin 
gularly  rich  in  spiritual  values. 

The  quotations  from  the  writings  of  Sidney 
Lanier  are  reprinted  from  Poems  of  Sidney  Lan 
ier,  Edited  by  His  Wife  (copyright  1884,  1891,  by 
Mary  D.  Lanier),  through  the  courtesy  of  the 
publishers,  Messrs.  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 

The  author  wishes  to  record  here  his  indebt 
edness  to  Professor  Mims's  excellent  Life  of  the 
poet  for  use  of  hitherto  inaccessible  letters  and 
papers. 


SIR  GALAHAD 

THIS  chapter  is  to  be  no  biography.  It  is 
meant  to  touch  in  outline  the  character  of  a 
singularly  beautiful  human  soul.  For  in  Sidney 
Lanier  we  have  a  knight-errant  in  the  cause  of 
beauty  and  truth  and  holiness.  No  mail-clad 
warrior  out  of  the  shining  fields  of  old  romance 
ever  quested  for  fairer  adventures  than  did  this 
knight  of  our  new  days.  And  the  revelation  of 
his  high  and  unbending  nobility  is  to  be  sought 
not  merely  in  his  message  in  prose  and  verse;  its 
steady  and  winsome  radiance  is  equally  revealed 
in  the  very  character  of  the  man  as  he  opened 
himself  in  frank  unreservedness  to  all  with  whom 
he  came  in  contact  on  the  common  way  of  life. 
So  his  finest  poetry  and  its  deepest  spiritual  mes 
sage  may  not  be  read  so  much  in  rhythmic  verse 
as  in  his  brave  and  inspiringly  victorious  struggle 
against  the  untoward  conditions  of  time  and  cir 
cumstance,  in  the  stubborn,  cheerful  manliness  of 
his  combat  with  disease,  and  in  an  unwavering 
fidelity  to  high  artistic  and  spiritual  ideals.  In 
terms  of  character  and  experience  he  has  written 
perhaps  his  noblest  poem. 


io  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Fittingly  has  he  been  called  the  Sir  Galahad  of 
American  letters,  and  this  suggests  the  refined 
purity  of  his  nature.  One  who  shared  with  him 
the  horrors  of  prison  life  at  Point  Lookout,  in  a 
letter  to  the  poet's  eldest  son,  pays  this  tribute  to 
him:  "In  all  our  intercourse  I  can  remember  no 
conversation  or  word  of  his  that  an  angel  might 
not  have  uttered  or  listened  to.  Set  this  down  in 
your  memory.  ...  It  will  throw  light  upon  other 
points,  and  prove  the  truth  of  Sir  Galahad's 
words,  'My  strength  is  as  the  strength  of  ten, 
because  my  heart  is  pure/  }>1  In  this  whiteness 
of  soul  and  candor  of  character  is  to  be  found 
the  real  source  of  the  spiritual  and  religious  mean 
ing  of  his  message.  With  him  there  is  no  divorce 
between  the  man  and  his  works;  as  one  listens  to 
the  clear  moral  purity  of  his  poetry,  there  is  no 
need  of  a  blinking  apology  for  any  soil  of  sin  or 
wanderings  in  dark  and  forbidden  ways  on  the 
part  of  the  man.  And  the  high  spiritual  quality 
of  his  song  so  truly  and  beautifully  expresses  his 
life  that  one  may  use  his  own  words  to  describe  the 
wedding  of  the  two — Song  and  Life — which  our  Sir 
Galahad  sought  to  compass.  Interpreting  the 
artist  in  music,  he  queries  whether  anyone  had  so 

lived  and  sung,  that  Life  and  Song 
Might  each  express  the  other's  all, 


1  From  Mims's  Life  of  Lanier. 


SIR  GALAHAD  n 

Careless  if  life  or  art  were  long 

Since  both  were  one,  to  stand  or  fall: 

So  that  the  wonder  struck  the  crowd, 

Who  shouted  it  about  the  land: 
His  song  was  only  living  aloud, 

His  work,  a  singing  with  his  hand! 

Of  the  best  Southern  stock,  from  a  moral  stand 
point  anyway,  Sidney  Lanier  was  born  at  Macon, 
Georgia,  on  the  third  of  February,  1842.  If  there 
is  anything  in  ancestry,  he  came  naturally  by  both 
the  religious  and  the  artistic  qualities  of  his  nature. 
On  his  father's  side  his  more  remote  ancestors  had 
been  noted  as  artists,  particularly  musicians,  en 
joying  the  favor  of  at  least  four  English  sovereigns 
— Elizabeth,  James  I,  Charles  I,  and  Charles  II. 
The  first  Virginia  Laniers  belonged  to  a  colony 
of  French  Huguenots — a  strain  of  blood  that  has 
touched  Southern  life  with  intellectual  fineness 
and  fortified  it  with  moral  strength.  A  branch 
of  the  family  moved  to  North  Carolina,  and  there 
we  find  them  Methodists.  The  poet's  grand 
father,  Sterling  Lanier,  settled  at  Macon,  Georgia, 
an  active  Methodist,  educating  his  daughters  at 
the  old  Wesleyan  Female  College,  and  his  son 
Robert  Sampson  Lanier,  the  father  of  the  poet, 
at  old  Randolph-Macon  in  Virginia.  From  col 
lege  Robert  Sampson  Lanier  came  to  take  up  the 
practice  of  law  and  to  marry  Mary  Jane  Anderson, 
the  daughter  of  a  successful  Virginia  planter  apd 


12  SIDNEY  LANIER 

influential  politician.  The  poet's  mother  was  of 
Scotch-Irish  blood  and  a  Presbyterian  of  the 
straitest  sect,  training  her  children  in  the  stern, 
stubborn  faith  of  Calvinism. 

A  poet  with  such  currents  of  blood  flowing  in 
his  veins  must  of  necessity,  it  seems,  be  anchored 
so  strongly  to  the  verities  of  the  moral  life  that 
neither  the  "twist  and  cross"  of  things,  nor  the 
fiercest  storms  of  circumstance  could  ever  wrench 
his  ship  of  faith  quite  from  its  moorings.  Hugue 
not,  Methodist,  Scotch-Irish,  Presbyterian — here 
are  forces  dominant  enough  to  fortify  and  steady 
a  man's  religious  faith,  to  set  his  thinking  under 
the  rule  and  guidance  of  moral  ideas,  and,  if  he  be 
an  artist,  as  Lanier  was,  to  inform  his  work  with 
a  content  of  spiritual  truth  and  the  aspiration  to 
know  and  interpret  the  divine  meaning  in  things. 
And  all  this,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  can  be  said  of  the 
life  and  poetry  of  Lanier. 

By  inheritance,  home  surroundings,  and  train 
ing  he  might,  therefore,  be  properly  called  a 
Puritan  as  to  the  essential  elements  of  character 
and  temperament  which  these  things  necessarily 
brought  to  him.  While  Puritanism,  in  a  way 
unbending  and  compelling,  lay  at  the  roots  of 
his  nature,  yet  it  was  modified  by  the  fact  that 
he  was  a  Southerner  by  inheritance,  by  the  sur 
roundings  that  shaped  and  colored  his  life,  and 


SIR  GALAHAD  13 

by  the  further  fact  that  he  was  an  artist  by  tem 
perament.  These  influences  tended  to  soften  the 
hardness  of  his  Puritanism,  touching  with  tender 
ness  and  beauty  its  sterner  features,  without  in 
the  least,  however,  enfeebling  its  real  moral  fiber 
or  dulling  its  sense  of  spiritual  values. 

His  immediate  family  and  community  sur 
roundings  in  Macon  were  those  of  culture,  re 
finement,  the  social  charm,  and  the  gracious 
atmosphere  of  hospitality  which  characterized 
the  old  South.  Under  such  influences,  with  two 
brothers  and  a  sister  who,  he  says,  was  a  "Vestal 
Sister,  who  had,  more  perfectly  than  all  the  men 
and  women  of  the  earth,  nay,  more  perfectly  than 
any  star  or  any  dream,  the  simple  majesty  and 
the  serene  purity  of  the  Winged  Folk  up  Yonder," 
he  passed  a  happy  and  wholesome  boyhood,  and, 
as  a  clever  lad,  took  his  schooling  in  books  from 
two  or  three  different  teachers.  He  was  already 
an  ardent  musician,  particularly  upon  "a  simple 
one-keyed  flute,"  and  was  immersing  himself  in 
the  joys  of  romantic  stories — those  of  Sir  Walter 
Scott,  Froissart,  and  Gil  Bias,  in  particular. 

At  sixteen  he  joined  the  sophomore  class  of 
Oglethorpe  University  at  Milledgeville — a  small 
college  owned  and  controlled  by  the  Presbyterian 
Church.  Three  or  four  significant  influences  here 
entered  to  color  the  temperament  and  shape  the 


14  SIDNEY  LANIER 

character  of  the  future  poet.  The  first  was  the 
pervasive  atmosphere  of  conservative  piety,  a  bit 
harsh,  perhaps,  yet  strong  in  the  imperatives  of 
faith  and  blown  through  by  the  stern  "north  wind 
of  duty" — an  atmosphere  which  no  impressionable 
young  man  could  breathe  for  three  years  and 
afterward  depart  far  from  its  fundamental  reli 
gious  ideals.  Literature,  the  world's  best,  came 
to  vitalize  the  budding  genius  of  the  young  poet, 
and  he  was  able  also  to  indulge  his  passion  for 
music.  Sympathetic  friends  entered  deeply  into 
his  life,  and  one  teacher  in  particular,  Dr.  Wood- 
row,  brought  to  him  the  inspiration  of  his  per 
sonality,  awoke  the  spirit  of  scholarship  that  was 
always  so  largely  a  part  of  Lanier's  nature,  and 
suggested  wide  fields  of  study  at  some  university 
of  the  Old  World. 

In  July,  1860,  he  graduated,  the  first  in  his 
class,  and  as  a  reward  for  the  excellence  of  his 
scholarship  he  was  appointed  tutor  in  his  Alma 
Mater.  He  took  up  his  work  gladly,  dreaming 
of  success  in  the  world  of  scholarship  and  of 
music.  Already  he  was  feeling  his  way,  so  to 
speak,  after  a  career.  And  even  in  this  the  es 
sentially  religious  quality  of  his  temperament  is 
revealed.  In  a  notebook  of  his  early  student  days 
he  is  trying  "to  ascertain  God's  will"  with  refer 
ence  to  himself.  In  music,  he  says,  "I  have  the 


SIR  GALAHAD  15 

greatest  talent;  indeed,  not  boasting,  for  God 
gave  it  me,  I  have  an  extraordinary  musical  talent, 
and  I  feel  it  within  me  plainly  that  I  could  rise  as 
high  as  any  composer." 

This  simply  means  that  his  genius  was  calling 
to  him,  and  he  was  reverently  receiving  it  as  the 
gift  of  God.  But  there  was  another  call.  It  was 
the  clamorous  voice  of  love  of  state  and  section 
shouting  to  war,  and  the  young  poet,  with  mind 
charged  with  glorious  dreams  of  music  and  schol 
arship  and  a  heart  ready  for  a  kind  of  divine  con 
secration  to  both,  must  hearken  and  obey.  The 
artist  and  the  scholar  are  transformed  into  the 
soldier.  That  knightliness  of  character  which 
was  about  to  devote  itself  to  the  shining  way  of 
truth  and  art  now  poured  itself,  with  all  the  ardor 
of  his  soul,  into  the  grim  duties  of  war.  In  all 
its  varying  experiences  it  is  good  to  think  that 
our  poet  comported  himself  as  a  knight  without 
fear  and  without  reproach.  As  private  soldier, 
as  scout,  as  signal  officer,  as  blockade  runner,  as 
a  prisoner  amid  the  horrors  of  Point  Lookout,  in 
battle  and  by  camp  fire,  he  was  still  Sir  Galahad 
in  conduct  and  character,  hating  war  yet  loving 
greatly  to  perform  the  stern  duties  it  brought  him, 
and  loyal  through  it  all  to  music  and  poetry.  The 
school  of  war  is  the  school  that  tries  men's  souls; 
in  its  fiery  furnace  the  real  stuff  of  their  manhood 


i6  SIDNEY  LANIER 

is  tested.  Lanier  came  out  of  it  with  the  gold 
of  his  nature  untarnished,  and  no  doubt  in  the 
great  deeps  of  his  nature  he  was  the  richer  for 
its  trying  experiences. 

Perhaps  the  next  eight  years  of  Lanier's  life, 
from  1865  to  1873,  were  even  more  trying  upon 
him,  as  they  were  upon  every  thoughtful  and 
patriotic  Southern  man,  than  the  four  years  of  bat 
tle.  Dismissed  from  prison  broken  in  health,  the 
seeds  of  consumption  already  sown,  with  a  single 
gold  coin  in  his  pocket  and  his  beloved  flute  under 
his  coat,  he  takes  the  long,  weary  journey  home. 
The  war  is  over,  but  a  bitterer  struggle  is  to  come. 
The  whole  Southern  social  system  has  collapsed; 
trade  is  paralyzed;  the  awful  dread  of  negro  domi 
nation  grins  like  a  hideous  nightmare  in  the 
thought  of  the  South;  the  horrors  of  reconstruc 
tion  are  impending;  wreck  and  ruin  and  poverty 
stare  the  returned  soldier  cruelly  in  the  face; 
poignant,  unavailing  sorrow  for  a  government  and 
a  cause  lost  forever  hangs  its  leaden  weight  upon 
every  heart;  hands  unused  to  the  hard  toil  of 
the  farm,  the  shop,  and  the  store  must,  without 
capital,  be  set  to  the  painful  task  of  redeeming, 
as  best  they  could,  a  destroyed  industrial  system; 
the  political  thinking  and  acting  of  the  entire 
section  must  be  led  into  strangely  unfamiliar  and 
devious  ways;  and,  worse  perhaps  than  all,  tears 


SIR  GALAHAD  17 

for  the  dead  that  lie  on  distant  battlefields  are 
yet  wet  upon  the  cheeks  of  woe. 

How  he  will  meet  these  conditions  will  fur 
nish  a  test  of  the  quality  of  Lanier's  soul,  the 
fiber  of  his  manhood,  and  the  strength  of  his 
faith.  He  might  have  sat  down  in  utter  despair, 
nursing  a  wasted  body,  and,  racked  by  disease, 
might  have  driveled  out  the  morbid  poetry  of  the 
sick-room,  of  blasted  hopes,  and  of  a  languid  faith. 
But  this  was  not  the  way  of  our  Sir  Galahad. 
In  these  sad  and  all  but  disheartening  conditions 
he  saw  his  duty  with  unblurred  clearness  and  met 
it  in  the  spirit  of  that  rare  quality  of  manliness 
which  was  his  always.  With  him  there  was  no 
repining  over  defeat,  no  whining  in  the  face  of  the 
inevitable,  no  bitter  cherishing  of  corroding  hate. 
Gladly  and  unreservedly,  with  a  kind  of  prophetic 
wisdom,  he  received  with  open  arms  the  new  and 
stronger  country  rising  out  of  the  twilight  gloom 
of  war.  He  had  said  his  word  on  the  horrors  of 
war  in  his  only  novel,  Tiger  Lilies,  begun  during 
the  struggle  and  published  in  1867.  Now  he  was 
fully  ready,  and  indeed  eager,  for  every  step  look 
ing  toward  reconciliation.  His  spirit  cannot  be 
better  expressed  than  by  quoting  from  a  letter 
he  wrote  to  a  Northern  friend  of  the  older 
days  before  the  disrupting  strife.  It  was  written 
in  1866,  hardly  a  year  after  the  war:  "These 


i8  SIDNEY  LANIER 

things  being  so,  I  thank  you,  more  than  I  can 
well  express,  for  your  kind  letter.  It  comes  to 
me,  like  a  welcome  sail,  from  that  old  world  to 
this  new  one,  through  the  war-storms.  It  takes 
away  the  sulphur  and  the  blood-flecks,  and  drowns 
out  the  harsh  noises  of  battle.  The  two  margins 
of  the  great  gulf  which  has  divided  you  from  me 
seem  approaching  each  other.  I  stretch  out  my 
hand  across  the  narrowing  fissure,  to  grasp  yours 
on  the  other  side."1  But  this  mood  was  not 
momentary,  called  forth  merely  by  the  proffered 
hand-clasp  of  friendship.  Four  years  later,  in 
making  the  address  over  the  Confederate  dead  in 
his  native  city,  he  closes,  in  part,  with  these  words : 
"To-day  we  are  here  for  love,  and  not  for  hate. 
To-day  we  are  here  for  harmony,  and  not  for  dis 
cord.  To-day  we  are  risen  immeasurably  above 
all  vengeance.  To-day,  standing  upon  the  serene 
heights  of  forgiveness,  our  souls  choir  together 
the  enchanting  music  of  harmonious  Christian 
civilization."2 

In  this  spirit  Lanier  faced  the  new  conditions 
and  took  up  the  common  duties  of  life.  Broken 
in  health,  we  first  find  him  teaching  thirty  classes 
a  day  on  a  plantation  near  Macon.  Then  a  winter 
near  Mobile,  Alabama,  in  the  effort  to  restore  his 
shattered  health,  followed  by  the  commonplace 

1  From  Mims's  Life  a  Ibid. 


SIR  GALAHAD  19 

work  of  a  clerk  in  a  hotel  at  Montgomery.  In  the 
spring  of  1867  he  was  in  New  York  finding  a 
publisher  for  Tiger  Lilies,  and  the  next  year  back 
to  the  drudgery  of  the  schoolroom  in  a  small  Ala 
bama  town,  Prattville.  But  even  this  experience 
and  the  wasting  of  his  physical  forces  by  his  first 
hemorrhages  could  not  quite  daunt  him  nor  keep 
him  from  studying  and  writing.  He  enters  with 
great  enthusiasm  into  German  and  a  mastery  of 
Lucretius  and  the  writing  of  essays  more  or  less 
speculative  upon  literature  and  philosophy.  In 
the  winter  of  1867  he  had  taken  the  important 
step  of  marriage.  In  Miss  Mary  Day  he  found 
the  chief  joy  of  his  life,  and,  as  one  has  said,  it  was 
an  "idyllic  marriage,  which  the  poet  thought  a 
rich  compensation  for  all  the  other  perfect  gifts 
which  Providence  denied  him."  To  him  she  is 
the  radiant  woman  of  "My  Springs": 

Dear  eyes,  dear  eyes  and  rare  complete — . 
Being  heavenly  sweet  and  earthly  sweet, 
— I  marvel  that  God  made  you  mine, 
For  when  He  frowns,  'tis  then  ye  shine! 

With  wife  and  child  the  poet  must  now  address 
himself  to  the  matter  of  immediate  support.  So 
he  takes  up  the  study  of  law,  and  in  1870  enters 
into  the  practice  of  it  with  his  father.  It  is  said 
that  he  made  a  careful,  intelligent  lawyer,  perform 
ing  with  accuracy  and  dispatch  even  its  humdrum 


20  SIDNEY  LANIER 

duties.  Yet  all  the  while  the  poetic  hunger  for 
expression  was  beating  at  his  heart,  and  the  forces 
of  his  genius  were  persistently  calling  to  him.  A 
word  of  cheer  and  encouragement  from  the  poet 
Paul  Hamilton  Hayne  brings  these  words  from 
him:  "I  have  not  put  pen  to  paper  in  a  literary 
way  for  a  long  time.  How  I  thirst  to  do  so — 
how  I  long  to  sing  a  thousand  various  songs  that 
oppress  me,  unsung — is  inexpressible.  Yet  the 
mere  work  that  brings  me  bread  gives  me  no 
time."  Still  the  word  of  his  fellow  poet  was  like 
wine  to  his  thirsty  soul.  "It  gives  me  great  en 
couragement,"  he  writes,  "that  you  think  I  might 
succeed  in  the  literary  life;  for  I  take  it  that  you 
are  in  earnest  in  saying  so,  believing  that  you  love 
Art  with  too  genuine  affection  to  trifle  with  her  by 
bringing  to  her  service,  through  mere  politeness, 
an  unworthy  worker." 

But  yet  another  thing  than  the  sacred  duty  of 
providing  bread  for  the  beloved  of  his  heart 
now  came  to  make  the  possibility  of  the  literary 
life  seem  even  more  remote.  He  must  take 
up  in  dead  earnest  the  fight  against  the  dragon 
of  disease.  And  how  valiantly  he  bore  himself 
through  it  all  belongs  to  the  inspiring  romance  of 
human  virtue,  in  the  noblest  sense  of  the  word. 
Pain  and  suffering,  baffling  weakness,  and  the  con 
stant  threat  of  untimely  death  were  never  ren- 


SIR  GALAHAD  21 

dered  more  beautiful  than  they  were  by  Lanier's 
brave  and  manly  cheerfulness,  his  unfailing  trust 
in  his  own  genius,  and  his  large  and  buoyant 
hopefulness.  When  one  tastes  the  strengthening 
spiritual  tonic  of  his  poetry,  one  should  not  forget 
in  what  storm  and  stress  of  circumstance  and 
experience  it  was  brewed.  In  the  next  years  of 
his  life,  from  one  standpoint,  he  was  but  a  wan 
derer  searching  for  health  and  the  surcease  from 
suffering  which  never  came — to  the  mountains  of 
Tennessee,  the  springs  of  Virginia,  to  Texas,  to 
Pennsylvania,  to  New  York,  to  Florida,  and  finally 
to  die  in  the  sweet  airs  that  hover  about  the  moun 
tains  of  western  North  Carolina. 

But  his  travels  had  their  compensations;  they 
widened  his  vision  and  brought  him  sympathetic 
friends,  like,  for  example,  Mr.  Peacock,  of  Phila 
delphia,  and  Bayard  Taylor.  Moreover,  he  came 
to  himself,  heard  the  irresistible  voice  of  genius 
persuading  him  to  art,  and,  like  Milton  of  old, 
consecrated  himself  to  it  for  weal  or  woe.  His 
resolve  to  devote  himself  to  music  and  poetry 
came  to  him  in  the  congenial  musical  society  of 
San  Antonio,  Texas,  in  April,  1873.  The  com 
plete  surrender,  however,  was  made  a  few  months 
later  in  Baltimore.  Here  he  had  found  not  only 
the  inspiring  fellowship  of  artists  and  an  intellec 
tual  atmosphere,  but  also  a  means  of  assured  sup- 


22  SIDNEY  LANIER 

port  as  first  flutist  in  the  Peabody  Orchestra.  He 
must  follow  his  "gleam"  now,  and  the  letter  which 
he  wrote  to  his  father  on  November  29,  1873,  is  a 
memorable  document  in  the  history  of  American 
literature.  His  father  naturally  had  taken  the 
more  practical  view  of  his  future,  and  was  urging 
the  expediency  of  his  return  to  Macon  and  to 
the  law.  But  the  poet,  with  an  abandon  of  cour 
age,  chose  the  better  part,  we  must  think.  His 
letter  concludes:  "My  dear  father,  think  how, 
for  twenty  years,  through  poverty,  through  pain, 
through  weariness,  through  sickness,  through  the 
uncongenial  atmosphere  of  a  farcical  college  and 
of  a  bare  army  and  then  of  an  exacting  business 
life,  through  all  the  discouragement  of  being  wholly 
unacquainted  with  literary  people  and  literary 
ways — I  say,  think  how,  in  spite  of  all  these  de 
pressing  circumstances,  and  of  a  thousand  more 
which  I  could  enumerate,  these  two  figures  of 
music  and  poetry  have  steadily  kept  in  my  heart 
so  that  I  could  not  banish  them.  Does  it  not 
seem  to  you  as  to  me  that  I  begin  to  have  the 
right  to  enroll  myself  among  the  devotees  of  these 
two  sublime  arts,  after  having  followed  them  so 
long  and  so  humbly,  and  through  so  much  bitter 
ness  ?"  It  is  to  be  doubted  whether  Milton  him 
self  accepted  his  mission  with  a  deeper  fervor 
of  consecration.  At  any  rate,  when  we  realize 


SIR  GALAHAD  23 

how  complete  Lanier's  consecration  was,  we  un 
derstand  the  better  the  moral  earnestness  of  his 
poetry  and  the  spiritual  quality  of  his  interpre 
tation  of  life. 

But  the  casting  of  Sidney  Lanier's  lot  in  the 
city  of  Baltimore  meant  even  more  than  the  asso 
ciation  with  congenial  and  sympathetic  friends, 
more  than  the  gaining  of  an  assured  way  of  sup 
port  for  wife  and  children,  whereby  he  was  enabled 
also  to  give  himself  to  the  service  of  the  twin  arts 
of  music  and  poetry.  It  meant  to  him  opportu 
nity  for  study  and  investigation,  and  furnished  a 
keen,  stimulating  intellectual  atmosphere.  Sid 
ney  Lanier  always  had  a  quick  sense  for  the  facts 
of  knowledge,  and  he  was  ever  a  valiant  seeker 
after  truth.  The  more  one  studies  the  make-up 
of  his  genius,  the  more  one  feels  that  he  might 
have  made  a  great  scholar  just  as  he  was  a  great 
poet  and  musician — a  scholar  in  the  sense  of  fidel 
ity  to  even  the  minutest  details  of  any  field  he 
might  be  investigating  as  well  as  to  the  meaning 
of  its  larger  truth. 

In  the  nourishment  and  direction  of  this  qual 
ity  of  his  nature,  Lanier  came  to  Baltimore  at  a 
peculiarly  auspicious  time.  The  Johns  Hopkins 
University  was  soon  to  be  inaugurated,  the  first 
real  American  university.  Its  president,  Dr.  Gil- 
man,  was  wise  enough  to  overcome  the  temptation 


24  SIDNEY  LANIER 

of  magnificent  buildings  and  invest  his  money  in 
magnificent  men.  So  he  brought  together  in  his 
first  faculty  a  remarkable  group  of  productive 
scholars  to  furnish  the  tone  and  ideals  to  the  new 
university,  and  thereby  to  make  of  it  one  of  the 
most  significant  forces  in  the  history  of  American 
education.  Lanier  opened  himself  to  its  influ 
ences  with  a  zestful  eagerness,  with  the  result  that 
he  all  but  made  up  for  what  he  considered  the 
more  or  less  barren  years  of  his  life.  He  drank 
deep  draughts  from  the  wells  of  knowledge,  thus 
enriching  his  thought  and  widening  his  outlook. 
This  experience  helped  to  put  that  stamp  of  sober 
though tfulness  and  serious  reflection  upon  most 
of  his  poetry,  the  final  impression  of  which  is  that 
he  was  trying  to  chant  the  song  of  eternal  truth 
in  relation  to  God,  to  man,  and  to  nature. 

One  need  not  be  told  that  these  eight  Baltimore 
years  were  the  happiest  and  most  fruitful  years  of 
the  poet's  life — happiest  in  surroundings,  in  the 
stimulating  sympathy  and  love  of  friends,  in  a 
growing  recognition  of  the  value  of  his  poetry  on 
the  part  of  an  elect,  if  not  a  wide,  circle  of  readers, 
and  most  fruitful  in  the  quality  and  quantity  of 
his  work.  He  filled  joyfully  these  years  full  of 
productive  effort — effort  congenial  to  all  sides  of 
his  nature — to  his  passion  for  music,  his  bent 
toward  pure  scholarship,  and  the  call  of  his 


SIR  GALAHAD  25 

genius  to  poetic  expression.  In  spite  of  the  pain 
and  weakness  of  the  disease  that  had  dogged 
the  days  of  his  life  for  nearly  twenty  years,  he 
was  now,  for  the  first  time,  really  living.  Some 
of  his  best  poetry  found  its  way  into  the  leading 
magazines — "Corn/*  "The  Symphony,"  "Psalm 
of  the  West."  In  1876,  through  Bayard  Taylor's 
influence,  he  was  asked  to  write  the  Centennial 
Cantata  for  the  Philadelphia  Exposition,  and  in 
1877  published  a  collected  volume  of  poems.  He 
was  also  engaged  in  delivering  courses  of  lectures 
on  English  literature,  which  were  afterward  col 
lected  in  two  large  volumes  under  the  title  of 
Shakspere  and  His  Forerunners,  representing  a 
prodigious  amount  of  labor,  and  revealing,  when 
all  things  are  considered,  a  remarkable  aptness 
for  scholarly  pursuits.  In  1879  he  was  appointed 
lecturer  on  English  literature  in  Johns  Hopkins 
University  and  the  fruits  of  his  lectures  were 
brought  together  in  two  important  volumes — The 
Science  of  English  Verse  and  The  English  Novel. 
In  the  meantime  he  had  prepared  Florida,  The 
Boy's  King  Arthur,  The  Boy's  Mabinogion,  The 
Boy's  Percy,  and  The  Boy's  Froissart.  The 
range,  variety,  and  amount  of  all  this  work  reveal 
the  fiber  of  energetic  manhood  that  lay  in  the 
depths  of  Lanier's  nature.  He  was  no  dilettant 
musician,  no  mere  dreamer  of  poetic  dreams, 


26  SIDNEY  LANIER 

but  a  worker  who  gave  himself  without  stint 
to  a  man's  joy  in  achievement.  As  rich  as  any 
lesson  from  the  message  of  his  poetry  is  this 
message  of  unremitting,  uncomplaining  toil  in  the 
face  of  all  but  insuperable  difficulties.  And  this 
is  another  element  in  the  fine  knightliness  of  his 
character. 

In  the  winter  of  1880  he  was  delivering  the  last 
of  his  series  of  lectures  on  "The  Science  of  English 
Verse."  He  had  to  make  the  journey  from  his 
home  to  the  university  all  muffled  up  and  in  a 
closed  carriage,  and  was  so  weak  that  he  had  to 
sit  during  the  delivery  of  his  lectures.  It  is  said 
that  "those  who  heard  him  listened  with  a  sort 
of  fascinated  terror,  as  in  doubt  whether  the 
hoarded  breath  would  suffice  to  the  end  of  the 
hour."  Grim  Death  is  close  upon  him,  yet  his 
dauntless  soul  fights  on.  Four  months  later  he 
is  in  New  York  arranging  for  the  publication 
of  his  Boy's  King  Arthur.  Then  he  goes  to  the 
mountains  of  western  North  Carolina  to  make  his 
last  fight.  How  the  end  came  is  best  spoken  by 
Mrs.  Lanier  herself:  "We  are  left  alone  with  one 
another.  On  the  last  night  of  the  summer  comes 
a  change.  His  love  and  immortal  will  hold  off 
the  destroyer  of  our  summer  yet  one  more  week, 
until  the  forenoon  of  September  7,  and  then 
falls  the  frost,  and  that  unfaltering  will  renders 


SIR  GALAHAD  27 

its   supreme   submission   to   the   adored   will   of 
God." 


We  began  by  calling  Sidney  Lanier  the  Sir 
Galahad  of  American  letters.  This  he  is  by  the 
purity  of  heart  that  brought  him  to  see  God,  by 
the  unsullied  whiteness  of  his- soul,  by  a  character 
of  singular  strength  and  Christly  tenderness,  by 
a  life  of  suffering  bravely  borne,  led  by  loftiest 
ideals,  devoted  to  the  highest  endeavors,  beauti 
fully  faithful  to  every  trust,  and  finally  conquering 
against  dire  and  unrelenting  odds.  It  may  be 
said  of  him  that  he  walked  his  way  of  life  as  one 
conscious  of  spiritual  presences  round  him,  and 
sang  his  songs  as  one  inspired  by  them.  He  saw 
the  Sangreal  shining  in  the  murk  and  gloom  of 
things,  and  this  vision  gave  him  strength  and 
leading. 


II 

IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT 

ONE  may  enter  the  workshop  of  the  sculptor 
and  watch  with  entranced  interest  the  marvelous 
skill  of  hand  and  eye  by  which  perfect  form  is 
carved  from  the  rude,  shapeless  mass  of  marble; 
one  may  sit  by  the  painter  and  find  joy  in  the  way 
he  mixes  color  and  applies  it  to  canvas,  so  that 
the  character-speaking  human  face  or  the  beau 
ties  of  a  landscape  are  called  forth  under  the  magic 
touch  of  his  art;  or  one  may  curiously  investigate 
the  technique  of  the  poet  and  find  the  laws  and 
methods  whereby  he  has  shaped  the  potent  har 
monies  of  vowels  and  consonants  and  stress  into 
the  music  of  rhythmic  speech;  and  all  this  will  be 
profitable  and  help  to  an  understanding  of  the 
principles  of  the  three  great  arts.  But  to  stop 
with  an  ever  so  complete  and  satisfying  compre 
hension  of  their  mere  technique  is  to  be  yet  far 
from  the  heart  of  their  mystery.  Back  of  all  tech 
nique,  however  perfect,  lies  the  thought  of  the  art 
ist,  and  into  this  hidden  place  we  must  go  if  we 
would  fathom  the  real  source  of  his  power.  What  is 
the  nature  of  his  consecration  to  his  mission,  what 

are  his  ideals,  his  aim,  his  conception  of  the  use  of 

28 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  29 

his  art,  his  views  of  life  and  of  truth,  his  thought 
of  God  and  his  comprehension  of  spiritual  values, 
— these  are  the  things  which  finally  determine 
the  great  and  permanent  qualities  of  his  work, 
touching  the  products  of  his  hand  and  brain  with 
dignity  of  conception  and  depth  of  meaning;  or, 
in  default  of  true  and  straight  thinking  on  these 
things,  leave  statue  or  picture  or  poem  but  a 
cold,  lifeless  piece  of  deft  craftsmanship.  If  it 
be  not  profoundly  charged  with  moral  truth  it  is 
a  work  of  mere  preciosity,  and  lacks  the  informing 
spirit  that  makes  it  a  blessed  thing  to  the  heart 
of  humanity  through  all  the  ages.  For  the  vital 
izing  power  of  moral  truth  is  never  quite  absent 
from  the  world's  really  great  art. 

It  is  always  worth  while,  then,  to  get,  if  possible, 
within  the  deepest  recesses  of  the  artist's  thought 
with  reference  to  himself  and  his  work.  It  is  no 
merely  morbid  curiosity  that  has  caused  all  the 
world  to  search  every  nook  and  cranny  of  con 
temporary  fact  and  comment  and  tradition  in  the 
hope  of  finding  something  more  about  Shakes 
peare — his  life,  his  character,  his  thought.  Men 
would  feel  themselves  greatly  enriched  if  they 
could  hear  this  master  interpreter  of  human  life 
speak  in  his  own  voice  concerning  himself,  his  art, 
and  his  views  of  men  and  things.  Out  of  the 
multitude  of  voices  that  speak  in  his  plays  the 


30  SIDNEY  LANIER 

criticism  of  each  generation  has  teased  itself  to 
construct  his  philosophy  of  life,  and  discover  the 
spirit  and  aims  in  which  he  worked.  All  this 
effort  is,  in  its  way,  a  recognition  of  the  import 
ance  of  getting  within  the  thought  of  the  artist. 

Now,  in  the  case  of  Sidney  Lanier  this  is  com 
paratively  easy.  In  talks  with  friends,  in  familiar 
letters,  and  in  published  essays  he  has  frankly 
opened  the  door  of  his  thought  with  reference  to 
himself  as  an  artist  and  the  mission  and  spirit 
of  art,  particularly  of  music  and  poetry.  From 
a  schoolboy  to  the  very  end  of  his  life  he  con 
stantly  searched  himself  concerning  the  mean 
ing  of  these  two  kindred  arts,  and  of  his  own 
relation  to  them.  He  was  no  "wild  poet  work 
ing  without  conscience  and  without  aim."  But, 
though  an  artist  with  something  of  the  seer's 
vision,  he  was  yet  a  thinker  sounding  the  depths 
of  thought  and  testing  principles  in  the  light  of 
spiritual  truth.  The  record  of  his  thinking  has 
been  preserved  in  a  volume  of  Letters,  two  vol 
umes  of  essays — Music  and  Poetry,  and  Retro 
spects  and  Prospects — in  The  Science  of  English 
Verse,  The  English  Novel,  and  two  volumes  en 
titled  Shakspere  and  His  Forerunners. 

To  follow  Lanier's  thought  through  these  vol 
umes  might  seem  somewhat  beside  the  purpose  of 
this  study,  which  has  to  do,  more  narrowly,  with 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  31 

the  message  of  his  poetry.  Yet,  as  we  found  in 
the  previous  chapter  that  his  manful  way  of  life 
had  the  virtue  of  an  inspiring  message,  so  also 
the  same  virtue  will  shine  out  of  the  poet's  prose 
interpretation  of  art  and  life,  and  serve  as  one 
other  proper  introduction  to  the  understanding  of 
the  profoundly  religious  quality  of  his  poetry. 
Indeed,  three  things  cannot  be  widely  separated 
— his  life,  his  prose,  his  poetry.  The  truth  of  the 
matter  is,  his  verse  is  but  a  rhythmic  expression 
of  the  ideas  found  in  his  prose.  Besides,  the 
pedestrian  march  of  the  latter  now  and  again 
soars  with  the  wings  of  purest  poetry.  Some  one 
has  said  that  a  mere  drop  of  prose  in  a  verse  is 
sufficient  to  evaporate  all  the  poetic  beauty  in  it; 
but  the  drop  of  poetry  in  the  prose  adds,  rather 
than  detracts,  from  its  beauty.  At  any  rate, 
Lanier's  prose  is  the  prose  of  a  poet,  and  the 
thought  and  language  are  both  so  frequently  in 
the  mood  and  even  the  manner  of  his  poetry  that 
his  prose  message  must  also  be  included  in  any 
treatment  of  that  of  his  poetry. 

Now,  one  need  hardly  be  told  that  Lanier  took 
his  art  seriously,  nay,  even  religiously.  Whatever 
his  attainment  in  it,  what  he  thought  of  it  and  of 
his  relation  to  it,  is  of  itself  a  very  noble  matter  to 
consider.  Indeed,  Lanier  deserves  to  be  reckoned 
among  those  choice  spirits  who  have  followed  the 


32  SIDNEY  LANIER 

beauty  of  art  for  its  own  sake.  And  so  sun-clear 
is  he  in  the  purity  of  his  motive  and  aim,  so  high 
is  his  conception  of  the  mark  toward  which  he 
set  all  his  endeavors,  so  devout  and  reverent  in 
his  prevailing  mood,  that  one  may  think  not  so 
much  of  what  he  did  as  of  what  he  tried  to  do.  In 
truth,  so  obvious  does  this  seem  that  it  is  a  kind 
of  wrong  to  set  against  him  the  reproach  of  im 
perfect  achievement — his  heart  held  so  steadily 
toward  the  vision  of  the  perfect  and  his  desires 
owned  no  other  goal.  How  could  it  be  otherwise 
in  an  artist  who  speaks  thus  (letter  to  Judge 
Bleckley,  March  20,  1876):  "Now,  I  don't  work 
for  bread;  in  truth,  I  suppose  that  any  man,  who, 
after  many  days  and  nights  of  tribulation  and 
bloody  sweat,  has  finally  emerged  from  all  doubt 
into  the  quiet  and  joyful  activity  of  one  who  knows 
exactly  what  his  Great  Passion  is  and  what  his 
God  desires  him  to  do,  will  straightway  lose  all 
anxiety  as  to  what  he  is  working  /or,  in  the  simple 
glory  of  doing  what  lies  immediately  before 
him."1 

It  is  clear,  moreover,  that  an  artist  so  possessed 
will  at  least  attempt  to  rise  above  the  mere  tech 
nique  of  his  art  in  the  brave  effort  toward  some 
thing  great  in  thought  and  feeling.  He  will  see 
his  art  and  its  meaning  in  its  larger  aspects.  In 

i  From  Mims's  Life. 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  33 

a  criticism  of  contemporary  poetry  (letter  to 
Bayard  Taylor,  November  24,  1876)  Lanier  inter 
prets,  by  inference,  his  own  purposes:  "In  looking 
around  at  the  publications  of  the  younger  Ameri 
can  poets  I  am  struck  with  the  circumstance  that 
none  of  them  even  attempt  anything  great.  The 
morbid  fear  of  doing  something  wrong  or  unpol 
ished  appears  to  have  influenced  their  choice  of 
subjects.  Hence  the  endless  multiplication  of 
those  little  feeble  magazine  lyrics  which  we  all 
know:  consisting  of  one  minute  idea,  each,  which 
is  put  in  the  last  line  of  the  fourth  verse,  the  other 
three  verses  and  three  lines  being  mere  sawdust 
and  surplusage."  With  him,  then,  art,  poetry, 
is  "holy  and  arduous  ground,"  and  "all  worthy 
poets  belong  substantially  to  the  school  of  David," 
where  the  mere  versifier  of  empty  nothings,  how 
ever  exquisitely  clothed  in  musically  consorted 
words,  has  no  place.  Though,  as  we  well  know, 
he  strove  with  painful  labor  after  technical  per 
fection,  no  mere  prettiness  nor  finished  cleverness 
could  satisfy  him,  if  the  deeper  currents  of  thought 
and  feeling  were  lacking. 

Lanier's  art,  then,  could  be  no  cold,  narrow 
scheme  of  technical  expertness,  and  it  could  not 
be  this  because  he  received  his  genius  as  the  very 
gift  of  God  and  because  he  consecrated  it  to  art 
as  if  he  were  obeying  a  divine  call.  On  one  occa- 


34  SIDNEY  LANIER 

sion,  when  he  realizes  his  mastery  over  the  flute 
and  feels  himself  strengthened  and  steadied  by 
the  joy  and  comfort  it  brings,  his  heart  can  only 
utter  a  prayer,  "For  these  things  I  humbly  thank 
God."  (Letter  to  his  wife,  January  30,  1873.) 
He  was,  therefore,  devoutly  religious  in  the  thought 
of  his  own  genius,  and  what  it  brought  to  him. 

This  essentially  spiritual  element  in  Lanier's 
temperament  shows  itself  again  in  his  conception 
of  the  mission  and  service  of  both  poetry  and 
music.  Speaking  of  the  latter  in  a  letter  to  his 
wife  (March  12,  1875),  he  says:  "It  (music)  is  a 
gospel  whereof  the  people  are  in  great  need.  As 
Christ  gathered  up  the  ten  commandments  and 
redistilled  them  into  the  clear  liquid  of  the  won 
drous  eleventh — Love  God  utterly,  and  thy  neigh 
bor  as  thyself — so  I  think  the  time  will  come  when 
music  rightly  developed  to  its  now-little-foreseen 
grandeur,  will  be  found  to  be  a  latter  revelation 
of  all  Gospels  in  one/'  He  was  constantly  refer 
ring  to  this  supreme  use  of  music  in  the  spiritual 
life  of  man,  how  it  was  to  become  the  fullest 
expression  of  his  deepest  religious  aspiration,  how 
"that  finally  we  are  at  the  very  threshold  of  those 
sweet  appliances  of  that  awful  and  mysterious 
power  in  music  to  take  up  our  yearnings  toward 
the  infinite  at  a  point  where  words  and  all  articu 
late  utterances  fail,  and  bear  them  onward  often 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  35 

to  something  like  a  satisfactory  nearness  to  the 
divine  object."  (The  English  Novel,  p.  149.) 

All  this  is  an  expression  of  the  profoundly 
spiritual  quality  of  Lanier's  temperament  and  of 
his  unfailing  religious  aspiration  toward  God.  As 
he  thought  on  life  and  its  issues  he  could  be  de 
pended  upon  to  put  the  stress  of  his  thinking 
upon  soul-values.  In  an  essay  written  at  twenty- 
five  (Retrospects  and  Prospects,  p.  6)  he  affirms 
that  the  progress  of  humanity  is  to  be  measured 
by  how  far  the  "sense-kingdom"  yields  to  the 
"soul-kingdom";  "as  time  flows  on,  the  sense- 
kingdom  continually  increases,  and  this  not  by 
the  destruction  of  the  sense's  subjects,  but  by  a 
system  of  promotions  in  which  sensuous  things, 
constantly  etherealizing,  constantly  acquire  the 
dignity  of  spiritual  things,  and  so  diminish  their 
own  number  and  increase  the  other.  .  .  .  Over 
this  route  nature  and  art,  like  a  bird's  shadow 
and  a  bird,  have  flown  up  to  to-day.  By  this 
course  politics  and  religion,  which  are  respectively 
the  body  and  soul  of  life,  have  acquired  their 
present  features." 

This  same  quality  of  temperament  spiritualizes 
nature,  and  makes  his  communion  with  her  a 
genuine  religious  experience.  To  him  nature  is 
no  dead  thing,  no  mere  specimen  for  scientific 
peering  and  botanizing.  Nature  is  but  one  other 


36  SIDNEY  LANIER 

revelation  of  God,  not  simply  to  the  physical  sight 
of  man,  but  to  his  deepest  soul.  Who  loves  her 
really  and  can  go  to  her  in  the  proper  mood  is, 
according  to  Lanier,  "ever  in  sight  of  the  morning 
and  within  the  hand-reach  of  God/'  (Shakspere 
and  His  Forerunners,  vol.  i,  p.  73.)  God  is  in 
all  and  through  all;  the  great  outer  world  is  not 
only  the  handiwork  of  his  power  and  the  mighty 
form  of  his  thought  in  his  shaping  of  material 
things;  it  may  even  be  the  expression  of  the 
Creator's  mood,  according  to  the  conception  of 
our  spiritually  minded  poet:  "It  is  very  true  that 
the  flat  land,  the  bare  hillside,  the  muddy  stream 
comes  also  directly  from  the  creative  hand:  but 
these  do  not  bring  one  into  the  sweetness  of  the 
heartier  moods  of  God;  in  the  midst  of  them  it 
is  as  if  one  were  transacting  the  business  of  life 
with  God:  whereas,  when  one  has  but  to  lift  one's 
eyes  in  order  to  receive  the  exquisite  shocks  of 
thrilling  form  and  color  and  motion  that  leap 
invisibly  from  mountain  and  groves  and  stream, 
then  one  feels  as  if  one  had  surprised  the  Father 
in  his  tender,  sportive,  and  loving  moments."1 
(Letter  to  Mrs.  Lanier,  July  12,  1872.) 

So  deeply  and  truly  did  he  realize  nature  as 
God's  own  world  that  he  felt  he  had  but  to  flee 
to  her  in  order  to  find  Him  when  men  seemed  to 

'From  Mims's  Life. 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  37 

be  leaving  him  out  of  their  lives  and  out  of  the 
creeds  which  professed  to  interpret  him  to  their 
thought.  In  their  fierce  discussions  about  God 
they  make  it  impossible  for  God  to  be  present 
with  them.  "I  fled,"  he  says,  "in  tears  from  the 
men's  ungodly  quarrel  about  God.  I  fled  in  tears 
to  the  woods,  and  laid  me  down  on  the  earth. 
Then  somewhat  like  the  beating  of  many  hearts 
came  up  to  me  out  of  the  ground,  and  I  looked 
and  my  cheek  lay  close  to  a  violet.  Then  my 
heart  took  courage,  and  I  said: 

'I  know  that  thou  art  the  word  of  my  God,  dear  Violet; 
And  oh,  the  ladder  is  not  long  that  to  my  heaven  leads. 
Measure  what  space  a  violet  stands  above  the  ground: 
'Tis  no  further  climbing  that  my  soul  and  angels  have  to 
do  than  that.'" 

If  his  temperament  received  nature's  message 
in  this  mystical  mood,  it  also  resented  as  an  af 
front  any  artistic  interpretation  of  life  which  was 
not  clearly  and  nobly  ethical  in  manner  and  mat 
ter.  He  was  tremulously  sensitive  to  the  finest, 
the  purest  things  in  art,  and  equally  repellent 
toward  their  opposites.  Any  touch  of  fleshliness 
all  but  sickened  him.  For  example,  he  could  find 
nothing  good  in  certain  "classical  novels,"  those 
of  Sterne  and  Richardson  et  id  omne  genus.  "I 
protest,"  he  says,  "that  I  can  read  none  of  these 
books  without  feeling  as  if  my  soul  had  been  in  the 
rain  draggled,  muddy,  miserable."  (The  English 


353175 


38  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Novel,  p.  1 80.)  Moreover,  so  lofty  is  his  ethical 
standard  that  he  holds  that  the  noblest  art  is  the 
product  only  of  the  noblest  living,  and  he  has  no 
patience  whatsoever  with  the  modern  preachment 
of  the  unmoral  quality  of  art.  "Art  for  art's 
sake'*  is  a  doctrine  abhorrent  to  his  soul.  "One 
hears  all  about  the  world  nowadays,"  he  writes 
(Music  and  Poetry,  p.  21),  "that  art  is  wholly 
un-moral,  that  art  is  for  art's  sake,  that  art  has 
nothing  to  do  with  good  or  bad  behavior.  These 
are  the  cries  of  clever  men  whose  cleverness  can 
imitate  genius  so  aptly  as  to  persuade  many  that 
they  have  genius,  and  whose  smartness  can  preach 
so  incisively  about  art  that  many  believe  them  to 
be  artists.  But  such  catchwords  will  never  de 
ceive  the  genius,  the  true  artist.  The  true  artist 
will  never  remain  a  bad  man;  he  will  always 
wonder  at  a  wicked  artist.  The  simplicity  of  this 
wonder  renders  it  wholly  impregnable.  The  argu 
ment  of  it  is  merely  this:  the  artist  loves  beauty 
supremely;  because  the  good  is  beautiful,  he  will 
clamber  continuously  toward  it,  through  all  pos 
sible  sloughs,  over  all  possible  obstacles,  in  spite 
of  all  possible  falls." 

To  Lanier,  therefore,  holiness  was  the  most 
beautiful  thing  in  all  the  world,  and  beauty  was 
holiness.  He  felt  that  the  really  great  art  was 
shot  through  and  through  with  the  highest  moral 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  39 

meaning.  To  show  how  firm  and  sincere  was 
his  conviction  of  this,  it  is  worth  while  to 
quote  once  again  a  part  of  those  nobly  eloquent 
words  to  the  students  of  the  Johns  Hopkins 
University:  "So  far  from  dreading  that  your 
moral  purpose  will  interfere  with  your  beautiful 
creation,  go  forward  in  the  clear  conviction  that 
unless  you  are  suffused — soul  and  body,  one 
might  say — with  that  moral  purpose  which  finds 
its  largest  expression  in  love;  that  is,  the  love  of 
all  things  in  their  proper  relation;  unless  you  are 
suffused  with  this  love,  do  not  dare  to  meddle 
with  beauty;  unless  you  are  suffused  with  truth, 
do  not  dare  to  meddle  with  goodness;  in  a  word, 
unless  you  are  suffused  with  truth,  wisdom,  good 
ness,  and  love,  abandon  the  hope  that  the  ages 
will  accept  you  as  an  artist."  His  first  book, 
Tiger  Lilies  (1867),  repeats  in  a  different  way  the 
same  attitude  toward  the  moral  quality  of  liter 
ature  and  art.  He  is  quite  impatient  with  "the 
horrible  piquancies  of  quaint  crimes  and  of  white- 
handed  criminals,  with  which  so  many  books  have 
recently  stimulated  the  pruriency  of  men;  and 
begs  that  the  following  pages  may  be  judged  only 
as  registering  a  faint  cry,  sent  from  a  region  where 
there  are  few  artists  to  happier  lands  that  own 
many;  calling  upon  these  last  for  more  sunshine 
and  less  night  in  their  art,  more  virtuous  women 


40  SIDNEY  LANIER 

and  fewer  Lydian  guilts,  more  household  sweet 
ness  and  less  Bohemian  despair,  clearer  chords 
and  fewer  suspensions,  broader,  quieter  skies  and 
shorter  grotesque  storms;  since  there  are  those, 
even  here  at  the  South,  who  still  love  beautiful 
things  with  a  sincere  passion." 

So  it  is,  as  we  get  deepest  into  the  thought  of 
Lanier  with  reference  to  art  and  nature,  we  find 
the  main-traveled  roads  of  his  thinking  leading 
toward  God  and  goodness.  But  God  is  also  in 
the  personal  life  of  the  poet  as  well  as  in  his 
thought  of  nature  and  art  and  the  larger  course 
of  human  history.  And  this  faith  is  one  source 
of  Lanier's  steadily  shining  optimism.  On  one 
occasion,  when  things  were  going  hard  with  him 
and  the  future  was  dark,  we  hear  him  saying: 
"However,  the  God  of  the  humble  poet  is  very 
great,  and  I  have  had  so  many  signal  instances 
of  his  upholding  grace  that  I  do  not  now  ever 
quite  despair  of  anything."1  (Letter  to  his  wife, 
March  12,  1875.)  In  the  larger  matter  of  general 
human  life,  moreover,  he  felt  the  presence  of  God 
and  recognized  his  providence.  We  get  this  nobly 
and  notably  expressed  in  a  criticism  of  the  musi 
cian  Schumann.  "What  I  do  mean,"  he  writes 
(letter  to  his  wife,  October  18,  1874),  "is  that  his 
sympathies  were  not  big  enough,  he  did  not  go 

1From  Mims's  Life. 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  41 

through  the  awful  struggle  of  genius  and  lash  and 
storm  and  beat  about  until  his  soul  was  grown 
large  enough  to  embrace  the  whole  of  life  and 
the  All  of  things;  that  is,  large  enough  to  appre 
ciate  (if  even  without  understanding)  the  mag 
nificent  designs  of  God,  and  tall  enough  to  stand 
in  the  trough  of  the  awful  cross-waves  of  circum 
stance  and  look  over  their  heights  along  the  whole 
sea  of  God's  manifold  acts,  and  deep  enough  to  ad 
mit  the  peace  that  passeth  understanding."  Truly 
is  Lanier,  in  his  own  words,  the  catholic  man 

who  hath  mightily  won 

God  out  of  knowledge  and  good  out  of  infinite  pain, 
And  sight  out  of  blindness  and  purity  out  of  stain. 

But  Sir  Galahad  kept  also  before  him  the 
vision  of  the  Sangreal  as  the  symbol  of  love. 
It  was  the  master-light  of  all  his  seeing,  the 
master-force  of  all  his  being.  It  typed  for  him 
the  very  love  of  Love,  which  is  Christ.  With  the 
power  of  this  love  he  solved  the  tangled  riddles  of 
life,  eased  its  pain,  found  his  own  most  abiding 
comfort,  and  made  his  final  test  of  the  glory  and 
preciousness  of  art  and  literature.  Holding  his 
own  child  in  his  strong  arms,  he  pores  upon  his 
face.  "The  intense  repose,"  he  writes  (letter  to 
Paul  Hamilton  Hayne,  March  15,  1869),  "pene 
trated  somehow  with  a  thrilling  mystery  of  poten 
tial  activity,  which  dwells  in  his  large  open  eyes, 


42  SIDNEY  LANIER 

teaches  me  new  things.  I  say  to  myself,  Where 
are  the  strong  arms  in  which  I,  too,  might  lay  me, 
and  repose,  and  be  full  of  the  fire  of  life  ?  And 
always  through  the  twilight  comes  answer  from 
the  other  world:  Master,  Master,  Master;  there 
is  one,  one  Christ:  in  His  Arms  we  rest!"  And 
from  His  outflowing  love  has  gone  the  potency 
that  binds  all  the  universe  together  in  the  beauti 
ful  fellowship  of  neighborliness.  "One  has  ap 
peared,"  he  says  again  (Music  and  Poetry,  p.  103)* 
"who  continually  cried  love,  love,  love — love  God, 
love  neighbors,  and  these  'neighbors'  have  come 
to  be  not  only  men-neighbors,  but  tree-neighbors, 
river-neighbors,  star-neighbors."  In  art  as  in 
life  this  power  of  love  is  the  saving  force,  the  one 
really  constructive,  creative  force.  "The  great 
artist  can  never  work  in  haste,  never  in  malice, 
never  in  even  the  subacid  mood  of  Thackeray: 
in  love,  in  love  only,  can  great  work,  the  work 
that  not  only  pulls  down  but  builds,  be  done:  it 
is  love,  and  love  only,  that  is  truly  constructive 
in  art."  (The  English  Novel,  p.  203.)  This  lamp 
he  kept  steadily  burning  in  heart  and  thought, 
and  he  permitted  nothing  to  dim  it,  neither  per 
sonal  suffering  nor  disappointment,  nor  the  time's 
tangled  confusions  nor  its  dark  uncertainties.  He 
was  ever  led  by  this  light  of  love,  and  it  held  his 
faith  secure. 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  43 

However,  it  must  not  be  thought  that  Lanier 
was  a  kind  of  pietistic  dreamer,  a  mystic  with 
drawn  into  some  hermit-cave,  detached  and  apart 
from  the  whirl  and  din  of  common  life  and 
everyday  interests  and  activities.  He  was  far 
from  being  one  who  would  divorce  the  life  of  the 
spirit  from  that  of  the  senses.  It  is  to  be  insisted 
that  his  ethical  idealism  and  spiritual  aspiration 
were  never,  in  his  thinking,  quite  removed  from 
the  practical  problems  and  daily  concerns  of  the 
immediate  world  in  which  he  lived.  These  things 
appealed  to  him  greatly,  and  his  thought  moved 
in  their  deepest  and  most  vital  currents.  He  knew 
modern  life  through  the  insight  of  the  poet  and 
the  knowledge  of  the  student  and  thinker.  And 
one  is  far  from  understanding  the  real  significance 
of  this  ever-aspiring  religious  spirituality  of  his, 
if  one  considers  him  as  a  mere  mystic  dreaming 
dreams  unbidden.  His  message  out  of  the  soul 
to  the  soul  in  his  prose,  as  in  his  poetry,  has  the 
added  virtue  of  being  his  way,  from  a  genuine 
knowledge,  accurate  and  broad,  of  affirming  the 
time's  greatest  need.  Indeed,  he  belongs  to  the 
race  of  preachers,  sent  to  proclaim  a  gospel  of 
faith,  of  holiness,  of  love.  To  be  sure,  he  takes 
no  specific  text,  and  develops  no  formal  sermon. 
Nevertheless,  in  the  wilderness  of  crass  materi 
alism,  of  heartless  trade,  or  a  godless  philosophy, 


44  SIDNEY  LANIER 

he  is  as  one  calling  to  repentance.  He  calls  in  his 
own  way,  it  is  true,  the  way  of  the  artist  and  the 
poet.  Yet  the  call  is  from  one  who  tried  to  see 
life  steadily  and  to  see  it  whole,  who  was  in  it 
and  of  it.  And  yet  withal  he  was  bravely  and 
cheerfully  optimistic.  He  quested  for  truth  and 
wisdom  and  goodness  and  love  and  God,  and  he 
thought  he  found  them.  They  may  have  been 
but  the  inner  beauty  of  his  own  soul,  which  he  was 
projecting  over  the  world.  Yet  be  believed  in 
them,  and  his  belief,  so  clearly  and  resonantly 
expressed,  has  the  virtue  of  touching  into  active 
life  the  dormant  and  languid  nobilities  of  other 
natures. 

So  the  word  out  of  Lanier's  thought,  as  that 
out  of  his  life  and  character,  is  a  message  from 
the  spirit  to  the  spirit.  He  is  of  the  rare  and 
radiant  company  of  those  whose  mission  is  to 
nourish  and  forward  the  spiritual  life  of  humanity. 
Beautifully  and  nobly  he  lived;  bravely  and  keenly 
he  searched  for  the  truth  of  things;  the  power  of 
a  great  consecration  rested  upon  him;  "with  toil 
of  heart  and  knees  and  hands"  he  struggled 
upward  "through  the  long  gorge  to  the  far  light," 
and  prevailed,  rinding 

the  topmost  crags  of  Duty  Scaled 
Are  close  upon  the  shining  table-lands 
To  which  our  God  himself  is  moon  and  sun. 


IN  THE  ARTIST'S  THOUGHT  45 

Beauty,  truth,  wisdom,  goodness,  love,  God — 
these,  we  repeat,  were  the  abiding  presences  of 
his  thought  and  soul,  the  ideals  that  strengthened 
and  cheered  him  in  many  a  gray  and  haggard  day 
of  wasting  weakness,  that  lighted  with  a  great 
light  the  gloom  of  untoward  and  all  but  baffling 
circumstances,  that  led  him  straight  and  sure 
through  disappointment,  bitter  trial,  and  a  long 
lack  of  recognition.  Granted,  if  one  will,  that 
the  poetry  is  imperfect,  that  the  singer  fails  to 
catch  the  immortal  note,  that  what  the  poet  would 
do  is  far  short  of  what  the  poet  has  done,  and 
that  his  ideals  of  both  truth  and  experience  are 
yet  a  long,  long  way  off  from  his  actual  utterance 
of  them — still  his  unshaken  faith  in  them,  his 
unbending  fidelity  to  whatsoever  things  are  lovely 
and  of  good  report,  the  undrooping  wing  of  his 
aspiration,  and  the  white  and  chivalrous  quality 
of  his  manhood  under  all  experiences,  furnish  a 
story  exceedingly  rich  in  the  poetry  of  human  life, 
and  constitute  one  of  the  precious  possessions  of 
American  letters.  Once  more  we  say,  his  actual 
achievement  in  verse  was  not  all  of  him;  the 
measure  of  the  value  of  his  message  is  not  to  be 
found  wholly  in  the  songs  he  sang.  He  was  not 
"that  low  man"  who 

seeks  a  little  thing  to  do, 
Sees  it  and  does  it, 


46  SIDNEY  LANIER 

but  the  "high  man"  who, 

with  a  great  thing  to  pursue, 
Dies  ere  he  knows  it. 

He  belongs  with  those  who  nobly  lived  and  loftily 
aspired: 

Here — here's  his  place,  where  meteors  shoot,  clouds  form, 

Lightnings  are  loosened, 
Stars  come  out  and  go!  Let  joy  break  with  the  storm, 

Peace  let  the  dew  send! 
Lofty  designs  must  close  in  like  effects: 

Loftily  lying, 
Leave  him — still  loftier  than  the  world  suspects, 

Living  and  dying.1 


JThis  quotation  from  Browning  has  also  been  used,  in  part,  by 
Dr.  Mims  in  his  Life  of  Lanier.  It  is  so  apt  that  one  cannot  resist 
using  it  again. 


Ill 

THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET— HIS  MISSION  AND 
SERVICE 

To  a  poet,  genuinely  called,  his  art  in  itself  is  a 
thing  of  beauty  and  a  joy  forever.  Aside,  indeed, 
from  the  imperious  compulsion  of  self-expression 
and  the  beauty  of  the  truth  which  he  means  to 
utter  through  art,  it  gleams  before  him  as  a 
radiant  ideal,  a  sort  of  divinity  to  which  he 
bows  himself  in  devoted  and  reverent  loyalty 
and  undivided  love.  Any  man  who  has  given 
himself  whole-heartedly  to  any  pursuit  or  pro 
fession  is  impelled  by  this  spirit  and  holds  some 
what  of  this  attitude  to  the  particular  activity 
that  commands  his  thought  and  absorbs  his 
energy.  If  he  sees  his  pursuit  as  a  mere  gain- 
getting  occupation  he  will  miss  the  greatest  joy 
of  his  life.  But  if  his  pursuit  stands  out  before 
him  as  a  thing  to  which  he  has  been  called,  for 
which  he  has  been  wholly  set  apart  by  tempera 
ment,  aptitude,  and  inclination,  it  is  transformed 
into  a  ideal,  evoking  the  strongest  love  of  his  na 
ture  and  gripping  his  allegiance  with  hooks  of 
steel.  It  thus  ceases  to  be  the  means  of  simply 
living  and  becomes  his  life.  Moreover,  from  this 

47 


48  SIDNEY  LANIER 

viewpoint,  even  the  prosaic  humdrum  daily  toil  of 
shop  and  store  and  office  is  touched  with  the  joy 
of  a  kind  of  idealism,  which  has  in  it  something  of 
the  beauty  of  spiritual  things.  The  worker  sees 
his  work  in  the  light  of  the  vision  of  the  Perfect, 
and  is  moved  by  impulses  finer  than  those  that 
drive  men  to  toil  for  food  and  shelter  and  raiment 
and  that  crude  product  which  the  coarse  hand  of 
the  world  adjudges  success.  If  he  is  fully  possessed 
by  this  idealism  of  work,  whatever  hand  or  brain 
turns  out  will  have  upon  it  the  stamp  and  super 
scription  of  his  character;  it  will  bear  the  very 
image  of  his  soul.  For  it  comes  out  of  the  deeps 
of  his  nature  where  the  ethical  forces  are  active, 
and  more  or  less  creative  and  original  will  be  such 
products  of  head  and  hand.  It  is  this  that  gives 
such  a  rich  value  to  the  work  of  some  men  engaged 
in  what  we  call  the  ordinary  pursuits  of  life — to  the 
work  of  the  great  craftsman,  the  great  merchant, 
the  great  organizer  of  large  industrial  enterprises, 
to  the  work  of  the  great  lawyer,  or  preacher,  or 
teacher.  We  but  superficially  explain  the  high 
quality  of  their  work  when  we  say  they  have  a 
genius  for  it.  For  this  is  only  another  way  of 
saying  that  they  are  passionately  in  love  with 
what  they  do,  and  that  they  are  beckoned  al 
ways  on  by  the  imperious  power  of  the  ideal. 
And  the  lesson  of  the  lives  of  those  who  have 


THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET  49 

really  wrought  greatly  in  any  pursuit  is  the  lesson 
of  those  who  follow  undauntedly  and  unwaver 
ingly  the  gleam  of  the  Perfect  for  its  own  sake 
in  whatsoever  hand  or  brain  finds  to  do. 

If  all  this  is  generally  true  of  the  world's  great 
workers  in  the  more  prosaic  ways  of  life,  it  is 
more  essentially  true  of  the  work,  spirit,  and 
achievement  of  the  poet,  or  indeed  of  the  artist 
who  expresses  himself  in  any  of  the  manifold  forms 
of  beauty.  From  primitive  times  the  poet  has 
been  looked  upon  as  a  man  set  apart,  divinely 
called  to  a  mission.  The  breath  of  the  gods  in 
spired  him,  and  he  was  their  appointed  spokes 
man.  His  words,  indeed,  were  not  his  own.  He 
was  but  the  mouthpiece  of  the  divine  wisdom, 
rebuke,  and  prophecy.  His  office  was  a  sacred 
one,  and  he  was  the  first  preacher  to  interpret 
spiritual  things  to  the  sons  of  men. 

The  sacredness  of  the  poet's  call  and  the  more 
or  less  spiritual  character  of  the  poet's  message 
have  never  quite  left  the  thought  of  the  world, 
even  long  after  the  poet  has  stepped  from  the 
inner  sanctuary  of  religious  ceremonial  into  the 
broad  light  of  common  day — simply  a  man  among 
his  fellows.  If  the  feeling  that  he  is  possessed  by 
a  power  not  himself  has  passed  away,  the  concep 
tion  that  his  is  a  mission  peculiarly  devoted  to 
the  highest  things  of  life  and  nature  still  persists. 


50  SIDNEY  LANIER 

At  any  rate,  the  true  poet  himself  has  this  concep 
tion.  His  aim  is  beauty,  his  service  to  interpret 
spiritual  truth  and  to  charm  the  world  to  the 
vision  of  the  ideal.  It  is  no  wonder,  then,  that  the 
mere  thought  of  his  art  is,  to  the  poet,  a  thing  in 
itself  transcendently  beautiful,  and  that  he  will 
not  only  ponder  it  within  himself  and  bow  rever 
ently  at  its  sacred  altars,  but  will  also  share  with 
the  world  his  own  loving  thought  of  the  greatest 
of  arts,  the  art  which,  above  all  others,  nourishes 
and  fortifies  and  guides  the  life  of  the  spirit.  And 
the  great  poets  have  loved  to  chant  the  beauty  and 
glory  and  sacred  purpose  of  their  divine  calling. 

We  have  already  found  this  particularly  true 
of  Lanier's  attitude  and  devotion  to  his  art.  As 
his  prose,  so  his  poetry  shows  how  constantly  he 
was  searching  its  meaning  and  mission  and  serv 
ice.  Indeed,  no  little  of  his  verse  is  but  a  turning 
into  rhythmic  form  ideas  and  ideals  already  ex 
pressed  in  the  soberer  garb  of  prose.  But  these 
ideals  and  ideas  are  so  lofty  and  stimulating,  so 
truly  an  expression  of  the  poet's  real  character, 
that,  in  spite  of  the  danger  of  repetition,  they  are 
quite  worthy  of  a  second  study.  They  get  a  new 
emphasis,  however,  by  passing  into  poetic  form 
and  by  the  beauty  of  the  symbolism  with  which 
he  clothes  them. 

Moreover,  as  one  listens  to  the  poet's  song  of 


THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET  51 

his  art  one  gets  a  fresh  impression  of  the  spiritual 
quality  of  Lanier's  nature  and  of  the  religious 
mood  of  his  attitude  toward  it.  When  he  sings 
of  his  art  one  has  the  feeling  that  the  song  comes 
out  of  his  very  soul,  and  that  his  mood  is  akin  to 
that  of  the  consecrated  priest  when  he  approaches 
the  inner  sanctuary  of  the  temple.  With  Lanier 
none  but  the  pure  should  enter  this  sacred  temple 
of  Song;  the  ministrants  at  her  altars  are  first  of 
all  to  be  clean  of  hand  and  heart.  To  be  a  poet 
is  to  be  not  merely  a  worshiper  at  the  shrine  of 
beauty.  It  is  also  to  be  an  ordained  priest  in  the 
service  of  spiritual  truth,  and  to  this  service  to 
bring  unsullied  purity  of  soul.  Yonder  is  the 
virgin  whiteness  of  the  tuberose,  and  this  is  the 
symbol  of  the  poet's  soul: 

Soul,  get  thee  to  the  heart 

Of  yonder  tuberose :  hide  thee  there — 
There  breathe  the  meditations  of  thine  art 
Suffused  with  prayer. 

Of  spirit  grave  yet  light, 

How  fervent  fragrances  uprise 

Pure-born  from  these  most  rich  and  yet  most  white 
Virginities! 

Mulched  with  unsavory  death, 

Grow,  Soul!  unto  such  white  estate, 
That  virginal-prayerful  art  shall  be  thy  breath, 
Thy  work,  thy  fate. 

It  is  to  be  doubted  whether  any  other  poet, 
English  or  American,  ever  uttered  a  truer  prayer 


52  SIDNEY  LANIER 

of  consecration  to  the  finer  spiritualities  of  his 
art.  And  this  is  not  a  vagrant,  passing  mood  of 
Lanier's,  coming  in  fitful  gusts  from  dim,  far-off 
heights  of  spiritual  aspiration.  Such  a  prayer 
represents  the  persistent  mood  of  his  thought  as 
he  chanted  the  song  of  the  poet  and  his  art. 

Now,  a  man  possessed  by  such  a  mood,  and  ap 
proaching  his  art  as  a  priest  entering  into  the  holy 
of  holies,  must  be  conscious  of  the  awful  responsi 
bilities  that  rest  upon  him  as  the  oracle  of  beauty 
and  the  announcer  of  the  deep  truths  of  the  spirit. 
Of  this  responsibility  he  cannot  rid  himself.  He 
cannot  shift  it  to  the  unbidden  voice  of  the  Muse 
speaking  through  him,  nor  to  any  vague,  mystic 
power  not  himself,  to  which  the  poet  may  some 
times  attribute  the  message  he  utters.  The  va 
grant,  uninvited  inspirations  of  genius,  though 
they  must  come,  in  no  wise  relieve  the  poet  of  his 
personal,  individual  responsibility  for  the  char 
acter  of  his  song.  He  may  not  quite  say  with 
Emerson, 

The  hand  that  rounded  Peter's  dome 
And  groined  the  aisles  of  Christian  Rome 
Wrought  in  a  sad  sincerity: 
Himself  from  God  he  could  not  free ; 


or  that 


The  passive  Master  lent  his  hand 

To  the  vast  soul  that  o'er  him  planned. 


THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET  53 

No;  the  artist  works  under  the  compulsion  of  his 
own  separate,  responsible  individuality,  and  in  the 
awful  freedom  of  his  own  will.  What  he  does  is 
his  own,  and  not  another's.  Yonder  floating 
cloud,  the  poet  sings,  is  moved  blindly,  not  by  the 
force  of  any  power  of  its  own,  but  under  the  irre 
sistible  compulsion  of  a  law  without  itself.  It 
possesses  no  "I,"  but,  on  the  other  hand, 

Awful  is  Art  because  'tis  free. 
The  artist  trembles  o'er  his  plan 
Where  man  his  Self  must  see. 
Who  made  a  song  or  picture,  he 
Did  it,  and  not  another,  God  nor  man. 

Yet  this  conception  of  the  individual  responsi 
bility  of  the  artist  does  not  sever  his  work  from 
all  relationship  to  God.  For  God  is  above  the 
artist,  the  object  of  his  worship  and  praise,  not, 
however,  the  maker  of  his  poem  or  picture.  These 
represent  the  artist's  praise  of  him,  wrought  in 
the  fullness  of  love : 

My  Lord  is  large,  my  Lord  is  strong: 
Giving,  He  gave:  my  me  is  mine. 

How  poor,  how  strange,  how  wrong, 
To  dream  He  wrote  the  little  song 
I  made  to  Him  with  love's  unforced  design! 

So,  reverently,  devoutly,  in  this  faith  the  artist 
works.  The  products  of  hand  and  heart  and 
brain  are  sacredly  his  own — his  own,  however,  for 


54  SIDNEY  LANIER 

loving  praise  and  dutiful  service.  In  a  humble 
yet  strong  recognition  of  his  gift,  he  may  claim, 

I  work  in  freedom  wild, 
But  work,  as  plays  a  little  child, 
Sure  of  the  Father,  Self,  and  Love,  alone. 

"Sure  of  the  Father,  Self,  and  Love" — here  we 
have  the  poet's  statement  of  the  three  elements 
in  his  creed  as  an  artist.  These  represent  the 
verities  of  his  thinking.  To  them  he  owned  and 
kept  allegiance.  They  were  the  fundamental 
articles  in  the  creed  of  his  faith,  and  of  them  he 
never  lost  sight.  His  work  as  an  artist  was  done 
in  the  consciousness  of  the  presence  of  the  Father 
in  the  world  and  in  the  heart  of  man,  in  a  lofty 
conception  of  the  dignity  and  importance  of  the 
service  of  poetry,  in  a  devout,  unshaken  aim  to 
be  the  best  and  do  the  best  in  order  that  his  song 
might  possess  at  least  the  beauty  of  holiness;  and, 
finally,  underlying  his  thought  of  the  Father,  his 
conception  of  his  art,  his  own  high  resolve  to  live 
and  sing  nobly,  was  a  love,  tender  and  deep  for 
all  things  fair,  and  large  enough  to  take  to  its 
heart  God  and  man  and  nature,  with  all  that 
concerned  them. 

When  one  considers  this  phase  of  Lanier's 
genius,  its  passionate  spiritual  yearning,  one  feels 
how  easy  it  would  have  been  for  him  to  have 
interpreted  the  poet  as  a  kind  of  mystic,  darkly 


THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET  55 

brooding  the  dim-hidden  problems  of  the  soul,  a 
dreamer  of  strange  spiritual  dreams,  living  wholly 
in  a  kind  of  realm  of  spiritual  shadows.  Not  so, 
however.  His  own  art  as  well  as  his  conception  of 
art  in  general  was  closely  related  to  life — to  that 
phase  of  life  immediately  around  him.  More 
over,  he  was  essentially  modern  in  the  nature  of 
his  thought,  and  consequently  in  the  meaning  of 
his  message.  He  was  not  even  a  singer  of 

Old,  unhappy,  far-off  things 
And  battles  long  ago. 

His  world  was  the  busy  world  of  everyday  men 
and  things,  and  he  was  never  very  far  from 
the  interests  that  most  deeply  concerned  them. 
Hence  his  art  appeals  to  us  not  only  as  the  rich 
flowering  of  his  own  strong  and  beautiful  per 
sonality,  but  also  as  the  voice  of  the  spiritual 
idealist  calling  men  now  and  here  to  the  eternal 
verities  in  the  life  they  are  actually  living. 

Besides,  he  tried  to  see  the  whole  of  life.  His 
faith  looked  out  upon  the  world  with  undissem- 
bling  eyes.  And  he  would  have  the  great  artist  take 
no  one-sided  view  of  life — the  whole  of  it  is  to  be 
the  artist's  material.  From  this  standpoint  he 
interprets  the  significance  of  Beethoven's  message: 

O  Psalmist  of  the  weak,  the  strong, 
O  Troubadour  of  love  and  strife, 

Co-Litanist  of  right  and  wrong, 
Sole  Hymner  of  the  whole  of  life. 


56  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Following  this  poem  through,  one  discovers  that, 
from  Lanier's  standpoint,  the  really  great  artist 
is  to  be  no  spiritual  prude  shrinking  squeamishly 
from  the  sin  and  evil  of  life,  nor  an  intellectual 
coward  holding  to  his  faith  by  blinking  life's  dark 
and  ugly  facts.  With  unabashed  eyes  he  looks 
steadily  at  it  all,  and  because  he  knows  its  contra 
dictions,  its  confusions,  its  hard-to-reconcile  con 
ditions,  the  triumphantly  assertive  "Everlasting 
Yea"  of  his  faith  sounds  like  the  trumpet  blast  of 
one  who  has  gained  his  victory  through  real  strug 
gle.  He  sees  that  truth  suffers  on  the  cross,  that 
nature  smiles  indifferently  on  Judas  and  Jesus, 
that  saints  are  cut  off  at  their  prayers,  that  babes 
and  widows  starve  and  freeze,  that  there  is  no 
mercy  in  nature's  laws;  yet  in  all  the  broil  and 
bitter  confusion  of  things  the  message  of  the  great 
artist,  who  sees  life  steadily  and  sees  it  whole, 
interpreting  its  contradictions  with  the  vision  of 
faith,  brings  order  out  of  chaos  and  harmony  out 
of  discord: 

I  know  not  how,  I  care  not  why, 
Thy  music  brings  this  broil  at  ease, 

And  melts  my  passion's  mortal  cry 
In  satisfying  symphonies. 

Yea,  it  forgives  me  all  my  sins, 

Fits  life  to  love  like  rhyme  to  rhyme, 

And  tunes  the  task  each  day  begins 
By  the  last  trumpet-note  of  Time. 

If  he  saw  his  art  in  this  light,  if  it  was  to  paint 


THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET  57 

the  whole  of  life,  and  reconcile  its  discords  through 
the  power  of  a  large  and  vital  faith,  what  was  its 
special  mission  and  service  ?  One  time  the  poet 
was  pacing 

at  pleasant  morn 
A  deep  and  dewy  wood. 

He  marked 

a  blossom  shiver  to  and  fro 
With  dainty  inward  storm;  and  there  within 
A  down-drawn  trump  of  yellow  jessamine 

A  bee 

Thrust  up  its  sad-gold  body  lustily, 
All  in  a  honey  madness  hotly  bound 

On  blissful  burglary. 

And  thus,  in  terms  of  the  bee's  rifling  the  flower 
of  its  nectar,  he  symbolizes  the  mission  of  the  poet 
in  the  world,  gathering  its  fair  and  noble  sweets. 
Yet  he  must  not  be  understood  as  an  idle  singer 
of  beautiful  things,  a  flitting  butterfly  seeking 
only  the  earth's  sweets.  To  the  world's  sharp 
inquiry, 

What  profit  e'er  a  poet  brings? 

the  poet  answers  much: 

He  beareth  starry  stuff  about  his  wings 
To  pollen  thee  and  sting  thee  fertile :  nay, 
If  still  thou  narrow  thy  contracted  way, 

Worldflower,  if  thou  refuse  me — 

Worldflower,  if  thou  abuse  me, 
And  hoist  thy  stamen's  spear-point  high 
To  wound  my  wing  and  mar  mine  eye — 
Nathless  I'll  drive  me  to  thy  deepest  sweet, 
Yea,  richlier  shall  that  pain  the  pollen  beat 
From  me  to  thee,  for  oft  these  pollens  be 
Fine  dust  from  wars  that  poets  wage  for  thee. 


58  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Now,  it  is  true  that,  when  we  try  to  get  beneath 
the  poetic  beauty  of  these  lines  and  this  quaint 
conceit  of  imagery  to  set  down  in  plain  prose  just 
what  the  poet  means  to  say,  just  what  measurable 
profit  the  poet  is,  we  shall  be  hard  put  to  for  a 
statement.  But  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  phrase 
his  meaning  in  exact  words.  It  is  enough  to 
think  that  our  poet  himself  is  deeply  conscious 
that  he  has  a  place  and  a  use  in  the  world,  that 
he  brings  to  men  some  high  and  noble  and  even 
necessary  thing — a  thing,  indeed,  which  they  can 
not  well  do  without — and  that  in  the  pollen  that 
he  bears  there  is  the  fertilizing  virtue  of  the  truth 
of  the  spirit,  out  of  which  bloom  the  fair  blos 
soms  of  the  soul-life. 

A  trifle  more  definite  is  his  interpretation  of  the 
poet's  service  and  mission  in  the  poem  entitled 
"Clover."  Lying  one  summer  day  in  a  clover  field, 
the  poet  fain  would  fancy  the  fair  blossoms  to  be 

Sweet  visages  of  all  the  souls  of  time 
Whose  loving  service  to  the  world  has  been 
In  the  artist's  way  expressed  and  bodied. 

Reverently  and  lovingly  he  clasps  them  to  his 
heart;  they  are  the  bright  throngs 

Of  workers,  worshipful  nobilities 
In  the  Court  of  Gentle  Service,  silent  men, 
Dwellers  in  woods,  brooders  on  helpful  art, 
And  all  the  press  of  them,  the  fair,  the  large, 
That  wrought  with  beauty. 


THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET  59 

But  here  comes  the  dull  browsing  ox,  the  cruel 
"Course-of-things,"  and  clips  in  his  "slantly- 
churning  jaws"  each  dear  head,  and  forward 
advances  one  inch.  Now,  asks  the  poet,  for  what 
have  all  these  artists, 

These  masters  wrought,  and  wept,  and  sweated  blood? 

Was  it  only  to  be  swallowed  up  by  the  course  of 
things  ?  "Not  so!"  a  thousand  voices  shout  in  his 
ear.  The  artist  and  his  work  fit  into  God's  larger 
plan  by  feeding  the  best  life  of  His  course  of 
things,  and  learn  this: 

The  artist's  market  is  the  heart  of  man; 
The  artist's  price,  some  little  good  of  man. 
Tease  not  thy  vision  with  vain  search  for  ends. 
The  End  of  Means  is  art  that  works  by  love. 

So  if  the  artist  works  in  love,  carving  his  statue, 
painting  his  picture,  composing  his  symphony, 
creating  his  poem,  he  works  in  the  conscious 
ness  that  he  is  a  ministrant  at  the  altar  of 
goodness  and  a  contributor  to  man's  spiritual 
progress. 

But  even  more  specifically  in  that  fine  poem 
with  such  an  unpoetic  title,  "Corn,"  does  he 
unfold  in  different  symbolism  his  high  conception 
of  the  poet — his  nourishment,  his  nature,  and  his 
service.  The  one  "tall  corn-captain"  that  stands 
out  in  the  foremost  ranks,  challenging  and  bat- 


60  SIDNEY  LANIER 

tling  against  the  uncultivated  forces  of  hedge 
and  thicket,  becomes  the  type  of 

the  poet-soul  sublime 
That  leads  the  vanward  of  his  timid  time 
And  sings  up  cowards  with  commanding  rhyme. 

Moreover,  as  the  corn-captain  sends  his  roots 
down  deep  into  the  common  mold  of  earth,  and 
yet  rises  gracefully  to  take  all  that  the  free  winds 
and  warm  sun  and  soft  showers  have  to  give, 
aspiring  ever  toward  the  heights  of  the  far-off 
heavens,  so  the  true  poet  himself  must  grow  "by 
double  increment,  above,  below,"  touching  the 
great  common  heart  of  humanity,  in  order  that, 
thus  being  thoroughly  democratic,  he  may  teach 

the  yeomen  selfless  chivalry 
That  moves  in  gentle  curves  of  courtesy. 

But  also  his  soul  must  be  filled  like  the  "long 
veins"  of  the  corn-captain 

with  sweetness  tense, 
By  every  godlike  sense  drawn  from  the  four  elements. 

He  is  committed  to  high  plans  and  lofty  purposes. 
No  narrowness  of  life,  or  knowledge,  or  experi 
ence,  or  vision  can  be  his.  All  he  must  appro 
priate  and  transmute  into  a  new  fineness  and 
nobility  by  the  spiritual  alchemy  of  his  genius. 
The  corn-captain  becomes  again  the  symbol  of 
the  poet: 

As  poets  should, 
Thou  hast  built  up  thy  hardihood 


THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET  61 

With  universal  food, 

Drawn  in  select  proportion  fair 
From  honest  mold  and  vagabond  air; 

From  darkness  of  the  dreadful  night, 
And  joyful  light; 

From  antique  ashes,  whose  departed  flame 

In  thee  has  finer  life  and  longer  fame. 

So  thou  dost  mutually  leaven 
Strength  of  earth  with  grace  of  heaven; 
So  thou  dost  marry  new  and  old 
Into  a  one  of  higher  mold ; 
So  thou  dost  reconcile  the  hot  and  cold, 

The  dark  and  bright, 
And  many  a  heart-perplexing  opposite, 

And  so, 

Akin  by  blood  to  high  and  low, 
Fitly  thou  playest  out  thy  poet's  part, 
Richly  expending  thy  much-bruised  heart 
In  equal  care  to  nourish  lord  in  hall 

Or  beast  in  stall : 
Thou  took'st  from  all  that  thou  might'st  give  to  all. 

Thus  in  manifold  symbolism,  a  bit  overwrought, 
perhaps,  at  times,  Lanier  touched  with  beauty 
his  various  conceptions  of  his  art,  what  its  quality 
and  what  the  nature  of  its  message  to  the  world. 
But  it  should  be  remembered  that  the  emphasis 
of  his  thought  is  not  so  much  upon  what  the 
artist  should  say,  much  less  upon  how  he  should 
say  it,  as  it  is  upon  the  essential  nature  of  the 
artist  himself  and  his  aims.  He  must  first  live 
nobly  and  broadly  and  deeply  before  the  qualities 
of  breadth  and  depth  and  nobility  will  appear  in 
his  singing.  This  was  the  lesson  of  Lanier's  own 


62  SIDNEY  LANIER 

brave  and  manful  life;  this  was  the  clearest  mes 
sage  from  all  his  prose  discussions  of  art;  and  now, 
when  the  poet  chants  the  song  of  art,  one  catches 
the  same  choral  note.  It  is  this  that  makes  the 
reading  of  this  phase  of  his  poetry  a  wholesome 
spiritual  tonic.  One  feels  that,  with  Lanier,  any 
way,  poetry  is  the  handmaid  of  religion  and  a 
nourisher  of  the  soul. 

Then,  we  should  insist  once  again  that  his  high 
aiming  has  a  spiritual  value.  He  had  better, 
perhaps,  stuck  to  plain  prose  in  his  interpretation 
of  art;  maybe  his  views  are  all  wrong  anyway. 
Besides,  his  own  actual  achievement  in  poetry 
was  far  short  of  his  ideals  and  standards.  Still, 
after  making  all  allowances,  one  must  say  that 
Lanier  is  to  be  counted  among  those  to  whom 
the  world  will  render  loving  homage  as  much  for 
what  they  tried  to  do  as  for  what  they  actually 
accomplished.  He  thought  always  on  the  highest 
things,  he  set  before  himself  the  noblest  standards, 
and  he  ever  strove  toward  them  with  all  the 
force  of  his  nature.  The  inspirational  value 
of  this  high-aiming  of  his  comes  to  the  drooping 
soul  like  the  breath  of  the  salt  sea  to  the  weaned 
body  or  the  healing  of  mountain  airs  to  worn 
nerves.  We  ourselves  are  won,  under  his  influ 
ence,  to  a  kind  of  spiritual  heroism,  and  are  lifted 
by  his  steady  passion  for  the  fair  nobilities  of  art 


THE  SONG  OF  THE  POET  63 

and  life.  This  virtue  of  his  high  artistic  ideals 
and  of  the  unflagging  ardor  with  which  he  sought 
to  attain  them  has  been  beautifully  and  fittingly 
interpreted  in  verse  by  Mr.  John  William  Jenkins 
(Outlook,  April  21,  1906): 

He  loved  his  art  and  freely  spent  himself, 
Counting  no  cost,  nor  measuring  his  days; 

Nor  turned  aside  by  misinterpreters 

Nor  halted  for  the  sweet  incense  of  praise. 

But,  even  amid  the  darkness,  his  fair  face 
Ever  turned  eager  toward  the  eternal  light; 

He  saw  the  bright  beams  of  the  coming  day 

Far  through  the  blackness  of  th'  enshrouding  night. 

Wounded  and  fallen,  still  he  struggled  on, 
Brave-hearted,  valiant  to  his  latest  breath: 

With  cypress  mourners  came;  but,  laurel-crowned, 
They  found  him  smiling  in  the  arms  of  Death. 


IV 

WITH  NATURE 

THE  great  god  Pan  has  been  dead  these  ages 
long,  and  with  him  have  gone  all  those  beautiful 
and  gracious  creations  with  which  the  imagination 
of  the  childhood  of  the  race  teemed  as  it  tried  to 
interpret  the  relation  of  man  to  the  great  outer 
world  on  which  and  with  which  he  lived.  Divin 
ities  no  longer  dwell  by  grove  and  stream  and 
fountain;  the  rustling  leaves  no  more  betoken  the 
presence  of  the  quaint  god  Pan;  Jove's  voice  has 
vanished  from  the  rolling  thunder,  and  Neptune's 
rule  over  the  gray  wastes  of  the  sounding  seas  is 
at  an  end.  With  the  spread  of  knowledge  and 
the  advance  of  science  these  all  have  left  forever 
the  haunts  of  nature.  We  now  know  her  for 
what  she  is,  have  revealed  her  mysteries,  have 
learned  her  ways,  mastered  her  forces,  and  bent 
them  to  the  common  uses  of  daily  service. 

Now,  with  the  reducing  of  nature  to  a  kind  of 
servant  to  drudge  for  us,  there  is  the  danger  that 
the  beauty  and  charm  and  mystery  of  God's  world 
may  vanish  from  the  imagination  of  men.  What 
ever  the  influence,  therefore,  that  helps  to  keep 

these  things  alive,  it  is  performing  a  distinct  and 

64 


WITH  NATURE  65 

important  service.  And  this  service  it  has  been 
the  great  function  of  art,  particularly  poetry  and 
painting,  to  render.  Gods  and  goddesses,  nymphs 
and  fauns,  may  have  all  entirely  vanished,  but 
modern  art,  while  looking  at  nature  with  quite 
other  eyes  than  those  of  the  elder  days  of  child 
like  fancy,  has  yet  preserved  for  the  children  of 
the  Great  Mother  her  loveliness  and  manifold 
spiritual  suggestiveness.  In  reverence  the  painter 
has  drawn  the  ever-fresh,  ever-entrancing  beauty 
and  impressive  grandeur  of  her  form  and  face; 
and,  working  in  words,  the  poet,  too,  has  filled 
the  galleries  of  the  imagination  with  imperishable 
pictures,  and  by  symbolism,  analogy,  and  parable 
has  interpreted  her  moods  in  terms  of  human 
moods,  keeping  the  heart  and  soul  of  man  close 
to  the  heart  and  soul  of  the  Great  Mother.  To 
the  poet  nature  is  no  dead  thing,  but  a  living 
reality,  informed  with  the  breath  of  the  divine 
life  and  one  other  revelation  of  the  divine  mind. 
Rich,  therefore,  is  she  in  healing  for  the  soul  and 
deeply  fraught  with  spiritual  symbolism.  Since 
Wordsworth  no  English  poet  of  any  consequence 
has  failed  to  bring  us  a  new  sense  of  the  beauty  of 
the  world,  its  power  to  inform  the  mind  and  reflect 
and  nourish  the  spiritual  moods.  So  essentially 
is  this  true  that  we  really  have  a  cult  of  nature, 
whose  members  are  a  kind  of  priesthood  worship- 


66  SIDNEY  LANIER 

ing  at  a  shrine  and  striving  to  interpret  the  mes 
sage  of  nature  as  one  of  the  oracles  of  God.  So, 
if  the  old  attitude  of  approach  is  no  longer  pos 
sible,  the  new  is  equally  potent  in  the  thought 
and  imagination  of  men  to  keep  fresh  the  beauty 
and  charm  and  mystery  of  this  wonderful  back 
ground  of  human  life. 

Now,  Sidney  Lanier  is  thoroughly  modern  in  his 
own  attitude  toward  nature.  All  that  it  meant 
to  Wordsworth  it  means  to  him.  Indeed,  that 
large  vein  of  mysticism  in  him  brought  him  into 
such  intimacy  of  communion  that  his  very  being 
seems,  at  times,  to  merge  itself  completely  into 
its  all-embracing  life.  And  this  blending  is  con 
siderably  more  than  the  result  of  the  mere  artist's 
worship  of  the  manifold  phases  of  her  beauty.  It 
is  a  genuine  love,  deep,  tender,  absorbing.  To 
this  sentiment  he  gives  himself  with  such  an 
abandon  of  ardor  that  to  our  ordinary  feelings  it 
seems  much  like  a  conceit  of  love  or  a  flame  of 
poetic  extravagance.  It  is  unlike  the  mood  of 
Wordsworth,  who,  with  all  his  priestly  worship, 
is  marked  by  a  certain  sober  restraint.  Lanier's 
terms  of  endearment  for  nature  are  more  like 
those  of  a  lover  for  his  beloved,  and  when  thus 
applied  at  least  suggest  affectation.  It  is  not  so, 
however.  His  character  was  too  genuine  for  that. 
It  is  rather  the  overflow  from  those  large  depths 


WITH  NATURE  67 

of  tenderness  for  all  things  great  and  beautiful 
which  underlay  his  temperament.  From  this 
standpoint,  one  feels  that  he  is  perfectly  sincere 
in  those  apparently  overwrought  expressions  of 
love  for  nature.  Such  a  passage  as  the  following 
is  thoroughly  characteristic: 

I  have  waked,  I  have  come,  my  beloved!  I  might  not  abide: 
I  have  come  ere  the  dawn,  O  beloved,  my  live-oaks,  to  hide 

In  your  gospeling  glooms, — to  be 
As  a  lover  in  heaven,  the  marsh  my  marsh  and  the  sea  my  sea. 

Or  again  to  the  leaves: 

Ye  lispers,  whisperers,  singers  in  storms, 
Ye  consciences  murmuring  faiths  under  forms, 
Ye  ministers  meet  for  each  passion  that  grieves 
Friendly,  sisterly,  sweetheart  leaves. 

We  shall  not  wonder  if  such  a  lover  has  eager, 

O         ' 

wide  eyes  for  all  the  rare  and  radiant  beauty  of 
the  world  of  nature,  and  also  a  heart  open  to 
its  deep  and  manifold  message.  So  to  him  she 
unfolds  her  hidden  mysteries,  and  becomes  the 
healer  and  the  teacher.  Her  voices  speak  to  his 
soul  in  no  uncertain  tones,  and  everywhere,  an 
obedient,  loving  scholar,  he  learns  her  lessons. 
Silence  and  patience  he  needs,  and  he  turns  to 
the  leaves: 

Teach  me  the  terms  of  silence, — preach  me 

The  passion  of  patience, — sift  me, — impeach  me, — 

And  there,  oh  there 
As  ye  hang  with  your  myriad  palms  upturned  in  the  air, 

Pray  me  a  myriad  prayer. 


68  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Out  of  the  intense  religiousness  of  his  tempera 
ment,  in  the  presence  of  nature  he  felt  that  he  was 
really  in  the  presence  of  God's  world — a  world 
which  was  not  only  a  revelation  of  the  divine 
power,  but  also  which  itself  returned  back  to  its 
Creator  a  kind  of  worship: 

Now  in  each  pettiest  personal  sphere  of  dew 
The  summ'd  morn  shines  complete  as  in  the  blue 
Big  dewdrop  of  all  heaven :  with  these  lit  shrines 
O'er-silvered  to  the  farthest  sea-confines, 
The  sacramental  marsh  one  pious  plain 
Of  worship  lies. 

Of  course,  such  a  conception  as  this  is  but  a 
notable  example  of  Ruskin's  "pathetic  fallacy," 
and  its  significance  consists  rather  in  the  revela 
tion  it  makes  of  Lanier's  own  spirituality.  He 
touched  nothing  without  adorning  it  with  a 
quality  of  spiritual  meaning  and  beauty.  He  did 
not  confine  his  moods  of  reverence  and  worship  to 
the  cabined  formality  of  a  definitely  stated  creed; 
but  God  he  tried  to  see  everywhere,  and  nowhere 
more  really  than  in  the  beauty  and  glory  and 
power  of  nature's  manifold  phases. 

Moreover,  so  intimate  is  his  feeling  of  fellow 
ship  with  nature,  so  sensitive  is  he  to  its  various 
aspects,  that  he  readily  translates  his  own  mental 
and  spiritual  moods  in  terms  of  what  he  sees. 
For  example,  as  the  vision  of  the  marsh  touches 
the  heart  and  soul  of  him,  it  pours  into  the  one 


WITH  NATURE  69 

the  quiet  joy  of  peace  and  rest,  and  liberates  the 
other  into  the  breadth  of  its  wide  spaces: 

Ay,  now,  when  my  soul  all  day  hath  drunken  the  soul  of  the  oak, 
And  my  heart  is  at  ease  from  men,  and  the  wearisome  sound 

of  the  stroke 

Of  the  scythe  of  time  and  the  trowel  of  trade  is  low, 
And  belief  overmasters  doubt,  and  I  know  that  I  know, 
And  my  spirit  is  grown  to  a  lordly  great  compass  within, 
That  the  length  and  the  breadth  and  the  sweep  of  the  marshes 

of  Glynn 

Will  work  me  no  fear  like  the  fear  they  have  wrought  me  of  yore 
When  length  was  fatigue,  and  when  breadth  was  but  bitter 
ness  sore, 

And  when  terror  and  shrinking  and  dreary  unnamable  pain 
Drew  over  me  out  of  the  merciless  miles  of  the  plain, — 
Oh,  now,  unafraid,  I  am  fain  to  face 
The  vast  sweet  visage  of  space. 

But  nature  pours  into  his  soul  not  only  healing 
and  consecration,  offers  not  only  an  altar  from 
which  the  incense  of  his  worship  may  ascend,  but 
she  brings  to  him  her  strength  as  well.  As  the 
sun  rises  in  lordly  majesty  in  the  silentness  of 
irresistible  might  over  the  wide  expanse  of  sea  and 
marsh  and  forest,  something  of  its  power  enters 
also  into  the  heart  of  the  poet,  and  whatever  the 
on-coming  day  may  hold  in  store  for  him,  whether 
it  be  the  burden  of  toil  or  the  anguish  of  sorrow, 
still  with  a  new  courage  he  can  say: 

But  I  fear  not,  nay,  I  fear  not  the  thing  to  be  done ; 

I  am  strong  with  the  strength  of  my  Lord  the  Sun : 
How  dark,  how  dark  soever  the  race  that  must  needs  be  run. 
I  am  lit  with  the  sun. 


70  SIDNEY  LANIER 

And  the  memory  of  its  light  and  power  shall  not 
leave  him;  trade  and  commerce  and  politics  may 
all  be  but  a  tangled  web  of  confusion,  cruel  and 
unjust  and  shot  through  with  deepest  wrong,  yet 
the  Sun,  dissipating  the  low-hung  mists  of  the 
morning,  and  driving  with  his  lances  of  light  the 
hosts  of  darkness,  becomes  a  kind  of  symbol  of 
his  own  luminous  faith: 

Oh,  never  the  mast-high  run  of  the  seas 

Of  traffic  shall  hide  thee, 
Never  the  hell-colored  smoke  of  the  factories 

Hide  thee, 
Never  the  reek  of  the  time's  fen-politics 

Hide  thee, 
And  ever  my  heart  through  the  night  shall  with  knowledge 

abide  thee, 
And  ever  by  day  shall  my  spirit,  as  one  that  hath  tried 

thee, 

Labor,  at  leisure,  in  art, — till  yonder  beside  thee 
My  soul  shall  float,  friend  Sun, 
The  day  being  done. 

Once  more  in  terms  of  nature  he  expresses  the 
sureness  of  his  faith.  The  thought  of  the  marsh- 
hen  setting  up  her  tiny  home  on  the  bosom  of  the 
limitless  spaces  of  nature  seems  to  have  the  virtue 
of  freeing  his  soul  from  all  disturbing  doubts  and 
disheartening  fears,  from  all  the  teasing,  per 
plexing  problems  of  life,  and  of  anchoring 
his  faith  securely  in  the  boundless  goodness  of 
God.  And  few  poets  have  more  nobly  sung  this 
final  achievement  of  the  spirit's  loftiest  aspira- 


WITH  NATURE  71 

tion  when,  eased  of  the  pain  of  its  struggle,  it 
rests  after  victory: 

Oh,  what  is  abroad  in  the  marsh  and  the  terminal  sea? 

Somehow  my  soul  seems  suddenly  free 
From  the  weighing  of  fate  and  the  sad  discussion  of  sin, 
By  the  length  and  the  breadth  and  the  sweep  of  the  marshes 
of  Glynn. 

Ye  marshes,  how  candid  and  simple  and  nothing-withholding 

and  free 
Ye  publish  yourselves  to  the  sky  and  offer  yourselves  to  the 

sea! 

Tolerant  plains,  that  suffer  the  sea  and  the  rains  and  the  sun, 
Ye  spread  and  span  like  the  catholic  man  who  hath  mightily 

won 

God  out  of  knowledge  and  good  out  of  infinite  pain, 
And  sight  out  of  blindness  and  purity  out  of  stain. 

As  the  marsh-hen  secretly  builds  on  the  watery  sod, 
Behold  I  will  build  me  a  nest  on  the  greatness  of  God: 
I  will  fly  in  the  greatness  of  God  as  the  marsh-hen  flies 
In  the  freedom  that  fills  all  the  space  'twixt  the  marsh  and 

the  skies: 

By  so  many  roots  as  the  marsh-grass  sends  in  the  sod 
I  will  heartily  lay  me  a-hold  on  the  greatness  of  God: 
Oh,  like  to  the  greatness  of  God  is  the  greatness  within 
The  range  of  the  marshes,  the  liberal  marshes  of  Glynn. 

Perhaps,  however,  the  religiousness  of  Lanier's 
attitude  toward  nature,  his  sense  of  her  virtue 
to  infuse  strength  into  the  o'erwearied  soul,  her 
subtle  power  to  calm  the  troubled  heart,  and  her 
mystic  spiritual  influences,  reach  their  climax 
in  those  exquisite  verses  entitled  "A  Ballad  of 
Trees  and  the  Master."  Here  we  have  a  deeply 
reverential  recognition  of  all  these  gentle  yet 


72  SIDNEY  LANIER 

strong  powers  of  nature,  and  a  perfectly  sincere 
expression  of  the  intense  spirituality  of  the  poet: 

Into  the  woods  my  Master  went, 

Clean  forspent,  forspent. 

Into  the  woods  my  Master  came, 

Forspent  with  love  and  shame. 

But  the  olives  they  were  not  blind  to  Him, 

The  little  gray  leaves  were  kind  to  him: 

The  thorn-tree  had  a  mind  to  Him 

When  into  the  woods  He  came. 

Out  of  the  woods  my  Master  went. 

And  He  was  well  content. 

Out  of  the  woods  my  Master  came, 

Content  with  death  and  shame. 

When  Death  and  Shame  would  woo  Him  last, 

From  under  the  trees  they  drew  Him  last : 

'Twas  on  a  tree  they  slew  Him — last 

When  out  of  the  woods  He  came. 

Thus  Lanier  turned  a  loving  gaze  upon  the 
beauty  of  nature,  and  reverently  endeavored  to 
help  other  eyes  to  see  that  beauty.  But  more 
than  this:  he  carried  his  heart  and  soul  with  him 
as  to  a  kind  of  shrine  whereon  he  might  offer  wor 
shipful  sacrifice  to  Him  who  made  it  all.  And 
this  act  brought  not  only  rest  and  healing  and 
consecration,  but  also  opened  doors  through  which 
he  might  see  the  face  of  God  and  hear  the  divine 
voice.  In  the  light  of  such  an  attitude  and  under 
the  influence  of  such  a  mood  the  great  outer  world 
was  not  merely  a  material  thing  touching  the 
senses  and  satisfying  the  purely  aesthetic  demands 


WITH  NATURE  73 

for  beauty  and  variety  of  form.  To  be  sure,  its 
loveliness  appealed  to  him  overwhelmingly,  and 
his  expression  of  it  was  all  but  ecstatic  in  its 
appreciation.  But  deeper  than  this  he  felt  the 
presence  of  the  very  Spirit  of  God,  and  through 
the  symbolism  of  nature's  various  moods  and 
forms  he  interpreted  the  truths  of  the  life  of  the 
soul  to  the  soul.  In  this  way  the  reader  of  his 
poetry  gets  not  only  a  fresh  appreciation  of  the 
beauty  of  the  world  of  nature,  but  also  a  winsome 
invitation  into  the  spiritual  suggestiveness  and 
significance  of  that  world,  and,  withal,  an  impres 
sive  revelation  of  the  spiritual  quality  of  Lanier's 
own  temperament.  And  this  all  contributes  again 
no  little  to  the  essentially  religious  character  of 
his  message  to  the  heart  of  man. 


THE  POET  AND  HIS  AGE 

THE  truly  representative  poet  speaks  out  of 
his  age  and  to  it.  Criticism  sets  itself  the  task  of 
discovering  and  emphasizing  what  it  calls  the  uni 
versal  elements  in  all  the  forms  of  arts — those  ele 
ments  that  somehow  have  the  virtue  of  appealing 
to  the  men  and  women  of  no  particular  time,  but 
of  all  time.  But  the  artist  himself  is  modified  by 
the  passing  conditions  of  his  own  age,  and  to  it 
he  delivers  his  message  as  if  there  were  no  after 
time.  This  is  not  to  say  that  the  poet,  for  exam 
ple,  is  not  conscious  that  his  utterance,  if  it  have 
the  quality  of  permanence,  must  be  illuminated 
with  the  steady  light  of  universal  truth.  His 
highest  mission  is,  by  the  penetrative  power  of 
the  imagination,  to  seek  to  get  beneath  the  pass 
ing  show  of  things — to  brush  aside,  so  to  speak, 
the  merely  contemporary,  and  interpret  to  his 
own  generation  the  truth  which  abides  through  all 
generations.  But  his  accent  is  that  of  his  own 
age,  and  the  general  interests  that  come  within 
the  range  of  his  vision  and  thought  are  those  that 
most  deeply  concern  the  men  and  women  of  his 
own  time.  He  breathes  their  atmosphere,  thinks 

74 


THE  POET  AND  His  AGE  75 

their  thoughts,  lives  their  life,  and  speaks  their 
language.  Hence,  in  a  very  true  sense,  Chaucer 
is  a  child  of  the  fifteenth  century,  Shakespeare  of 
the  sixteenth,  Milton  of  the  seventeenth,  and 
Tennyson,  Arnold,  and  Browning  of  the  nine 
teenth.  So  also  is  Sidney  Lanier  a  genuine  pro 
duct  of  the  nineteenth  century  in  the  conditions 
and  experiences  that  nourished  and  directed  his 
genius  and  determined  the  essential  nature  and 
service  of  his  message. 

Now,  there  were  three  or  four  great  movements 
which  absorbed  the  interests  and  dominated  the 
thought  of  the  century.  These  furnished  the 
atmosphere  and  inspired  its  thinking.  The  first 
was  a  social  and  political  movement.  Democ 
racy  came  not  only  to  bring  about  a  fresh  read 
justment  of  our  thinking  with  reference  to  po 
litical  rights  and  privileges,  but  also  to  set  a  new 
social  passion  in  the  hearts  of  men  and  to  inspire 
new  standards  and  set  up  new  laws  for  all  human 
relationships.  The  entire  literature  of  the  age, 
directly  or  indirectly,  is  a  literature  of  social 
record  and  interpretation.  Through  it  runs  the 
consciousness  of  fellowship  and  brotherhood,  and 
it  is  vital  with  a  sense  of  social  obligation  and 
helpfulness.  If  out  of  this  fresh  study  of  man  in 
society  and  the  passion  to  ameliorate  human 
conditions  there  should  be  born  a  new  science, 


76  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Sociology,  the  novelists  from  George  Eliot  and 
Dickens  to  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  make  of  their 
art  a  human  document  of  social  interpretation, 
and  the  poets  from  Wordsworth  to  Tennyson 
find  their  finest  ideals  in  visions  of  social  better 
ment. 

The  industrial  and  commercial  transformation 
of  human  conditions  also  inevitably  forced  the 
thought  of  the  century  into  social  channels. 
With  the  discovery  of  the  uses  of  the  physical 
forces  of  nature  and  their  practical  application 
to  the  service  of  industry  and  trade  there  came  a 
marvelously  rapid  conquest  of  material  conditions 
and  an  equally  marvelous  expansion  of  commerce 
and  the  accumulation  of  wealth.  With  passion 
ate,  all-absorbing  energy  the  English-speaking 
races  gave  themselves  to  manufacture  and  com 
merce.  The  smoke  of  the  factory  darkened  all 
the  landscape,  and  the  clangor  of  machinery 
drowned  all  other  noises.  The  hot  pursuit  of 
wealth  threatened  to  deaden  the  conscience  and 
wholly  to  destroy  the  life  of  the  spirit.  A  gospel 
of  mammon-worshiping  materialism  reared  its 
huge  altars,  and  the  fairest  and  best  things  were 
ruthlessly  sacrificed.  It  is  no  wonder,  therefore, 
that  the  literature  of  the  period  is  a  literature  of 
protest,  and  poet  and  essayist,  Tennyson  and 
Browning,  Carlyle  and  Ruskin,  play  the  role  of 


THE  POET  AND  His  AGE  77 

the  prophet,  now  calling  men  back  to  the  eternally 
beautiful  idealism  of  the  spirit,  now  flaming  forth 
in  the  righteous  wrath  of  moral  rebuke. 

And  when  we  consider  that  other  dominant 
movement  of  the  century,  the  scientific,  we  shall 
realize  that  the  century  had  all  the  more  need  of 
the  idealist  and  the  prophet  in  literature.  Science 
brought  to  the  age  not  only  its  methods  of  dis 
covering  the  physical  laws  of  the  universe  and  the 
means  of  applying  them  to  daily  use,  but  also  that 
which  is  far  more  important — a  spirit  of  inquiry 
and  an  attitude  of  mind  toward  all  things.  It 
taught  the  world  to  see  things  as  they  are,  and  to 
be  satisfied  with  nothing  else.  It  brought  to  men 
a  new  sense  of  the  beauty  and  value  of  truth,  and 
gave  them  a  method  for  discovering  it.  It  widened 
with  astonishing,  not  to  say  dazing,  rapidity 
the  bounds  of  knowledge,  and  enthroned  the 
facts  of  visible,  tangible  life  as  the  chief  goal  of 
effort  and  the  final  achievement  of  thought. 
Reason  based  upon  observation  and  knowledge 
laboriously  gathered  by  the  slow,  relentless  pro 
cesses  of  the  laboratory  were  to  furnish  the  one 
sure  basis  for  all  thinking.  The  only  results  to 
be  trusted  were  to  be  those  thus  arrived  at,  and 
nothing  was  truth  till  it  had  been  tested  in 
the  crucible  of  the  scientific  method  and  sub 
jected  to  the  fires  of  the  scientific  spirit.  The 


78  SIDNEY  LANIER 

purely  intellectual  became  once    more  lord  over 
life.  ' 

All  this  had  a  tremendously  disturbing  influence 
upon  religion  and  morals  and  the  faith-founda 
tions  of  each.  So  a  religion  and  a  morality  resting 
in  things  not  seen  had  to  be  justified  afresh  to  the 
consciousness  of  men.  Never  before,  perhaps,  in 
the  history  of  religious  thought  were  the  founda 
tions  of  faith  so  keenly  searched  and  tested.  And 
what  made  the  searching  and  the  testing  all  the 
more  significant,  and,  in  a  way,  perilous,  was  that 
it  came  no  longer  from  the  flippant  brutality  of 
an  unthinking  infidelity,  but  from  a  painstaking, 
reverent  search  after  truth.  The  general  result 
was  that  the  age  went  into  the  shadow  of  hesi 
tancy  and  doubt,  not  to  say  into  the  complete  dark 
ness  of  unfaith,  and  the  life  of  the  spirit  was  at  its 
ebb  tide.  Some  of  the  finest  minds  of  the  century 
were  sorely  perplexed,  and  drifted  rudderless  upon 
a  sea  of  doubt.  With  the  possible  exception  of 
Browning,  none  of  the  leading  men  of  letters  are 
quite  free  at  times  from  a  hesitant  mood,  and 
give  themselves  over  to,  if  not  actual  unbelief, 
at  least  to  a  more  or  less  flabby  uncertainty. 
Dr.  Lyman  Abbott  in  a  spoken  address  fittingly 
illustrates  with  Saint  George  and  the  dragon  the 
three  representative  types  of  nineteenth  century 
men  of  letters.  In  the  case  of  Matthew  Arnold 


THE  POET  AND  His  AGE  79 

as  Saint  George,  the  dragon  of  unfaith  has  won 
in  the  contest,  and  his  feet  are  upon  the  neck  of 
the  champion;  with  Tennyson  it  is  a  drawn  con 
test;  but  it  is  only  Browning  who  is  triumphantly 
victorious,  standing  erect  with  the  dragon  under 
his  feet. 

Nevertheless,  it  should  be  remembered  that  the 
leading  men  of  letters,  however  far  they  may  seem 
to  have  departed  from  generally  accepted  views 
of  religious  truth,  were  yet  steadily  on  the  side 
of  faith,  and  strove  to  keep  spiritual  aspiration 
with  its  eyes  fixed  on  God.  Arnold,  with  all  his 
hesitancy,  is  a  genuinely  religious  soul,  and  even 
though  he  may  not  have  found  God  by  way  of 
the  church,  his  face  was  set  toward  Him;  Tenny 
son's  noblest  poetry  contributes  to  the  nourish 
ment  of  the  spiritual  life  of  the  age;  Ruskin  is  an 
interpreter  of  art  in  terms  of  ethical  standards; 
Thomas  Carlyle  flames  forth  with  all  the  right 
eous  wrath  of  a  prophet  of  old  against  shams 
and  sin  and  unbelief;  while  Browning's  poetry  is 
a  poetry  of  a  faith  as  fixed  and  as  unquestioning 
as  of  one  who  had  really  walked  with  God.  At 
least  it  can  be  said  that  these  all  are  religious 
thinkers,  and  their  deepest  thought  seeks  to 
know  and  utter  the  truth  of  the  spirit. 

Naturally,  therefore,  the  poetry  of  the  century 
was  the  poetry  of  thought.  In  symbolic  terms  of 


8o  SIDNEY  LANIER 

beauty  the  artist  in  verse  sought  to  interpret  the 
deepest  currents  of  the  thought  of  his  age.  "Phil 
osophical"  is  really  the  word  which  best  describes 
the  general  nature  of  the  poetic  output.  Tenny 
son's  most  characteristic  poem,  as  perhaps  the 
most  genuinely  representative  poem  of  the  cen 
tury,  is  not  "Enoch  Arden"  nor  "The  Lady  of 
Shalott,"  as  beautiful  as  these  are.  It  is  the 
"In  Memoriam,"  a  poem  which  discusses  questions 
belonging  to  the  region  of  philosophical  inquiry. 
And  Browning's  most  characteristic  mood  is  also 
revealed  when,  with  curious  psychological  analy 
sis,  he  is  representing  states  of  the  soul  and 
unfolding  the  processes  of  the  mind's  quest  after 
spiritual  truth.  Moreover,  the  profound  signifi 
cance  of  Emerson's  poetry  is  to  be  discovered 
not  in  its  beauty  of  style  and  manner  so  much  as 
in  its  bare  thought-content,  in  the  quality  of  its 
message  through  the  mind  into  the  souls  of  men. 

It  is  necessary  to  remind  ourselves  afresh  of  all 
these  matters  with  reference  to  the  literature  of 
the  nineteenth  century  in  order  adequately  to 
understand  the  message  of  Lanier's  poetry  and 
rightly  to  value  its  spiritual  meaning.  For  the 
mark  of  modernness  is  upon  all  he  wrote.  The 
great  currents  of  the  thought  of  the  century  beat 
in  upon  his  mind  and  heart — its  social  pain  and 
passion,  its  tendency  toward  hard  and  cruel  mate- 


THE  POET  AND  His  AGE  81 

rialism,  its  worship  of  Mammon,  the  arrogant 
lordship  of  mere  knowledge  and  the  tyrannical 
dominance  of  pure  intellect,  the  inspiring  zest 
of  its  search  after  truth,  the  bitter  trial  of  its 
faith,  and,  with  all  its  doubt,  the  upward  cry  of 
its  heart  after  God.  These  are  the  things  over 
which  he  brooded  most  deeply,  and  these  are 
the  things  that  influenced  most  persistently  the 
meaning  of  his  message.  His  verse,  too,  is  heavy 
with  thought — so  weighted  that,  at  times,  one 
feels  that  the  poet  gives  way  quite  to  the  philoso 
pher  and  thinker. 

Nevertheless,  whatever  his  actual  achievement 
as  a  poet,  one  does  not  hesitate  to  say  that,  taking 
his  aspiration  into  consideration,  at  least  in  aim 
he  fulfilled  the  high  mission  of  poetry  as  stated  in 
those  noble  words  of  Principal  Shairp :  "The  true 
end  (of  poetry)  is  to  awaken  men  to  the  divine 
side  of  things,  to  bear  witness  to  the  beauty  that 
clothes  the  outer  world,  the  nobility  that  lies  hid, 
often  obscured,  in  human  souls,  to  call  forth  sym 
pathy  for  neglected  truths,  for  noble  but  oppressed 
persons,  for  downtrodden  causes,  and  to  make  men 
feel  that,  through  all  outward  beauty  and  all  pure 
inward  affection,  God  himself  is  addressing  them." 
And  this  is  the  general  nature  of  all  Lanier's 
message  to  the  souls  of  men.  If  he  spoke  out  of 
his  age  and  its  experiences,  he  spoke  also  to  it  as 


82  SIDNEY  LANIER 

a  sincere  seeker  after  spiritual  truth  and  a  devout 
interpreter  of  the  mind  of  God.  The  loud  noises 
of  the  passing  hour  did  not  deafen  his  ears  to  the 
words  that  last  through  all  the  hours,  nor  did  the 
dust  of  shifting  changes  obscure  from  his  eyes 
those  foundations  which  abide.  And  this  is  all 
the  more  remarkable  when  we  remember  that  he 
emerged  out  of  the  conservative  South,  with  its 
ruins  crashing  about  him,  into  a  strange  new  day 
for  which  his  past  had,  apparently,  not  prepared 
him.  Yet  he  realized  the  modern  world,  compre 
hended  the  great  currents  of  its  life,  and  sought, 
to  the  full  limit  of  his  ability,  to  hold  it  true  to  the 
things  really  permanent  and  worth  while. 


VI 

GOD  IN  THE  WORLD 

IT  should  be  remembered  that  we  are  not  to 
ask  that  the  poet  always  state  his  faith  in  terms 
of  hard  and  fast  exact  phrasing.  We  are  not  to 
put  upon  him  the  compulsion  of  expressing  his 
credo  in  the  verbal  clearness  that  we  demand  of 
the  theologian  and  the  philosopher.  The  very 
nature  of  his  mood  of  mind  and  the  essential 
character  of  his  manner  of  utterance  are  polar  in 
their  distance  from  the  methods  of  both  the  phi 
losopher  and  the  theologian.  He  may  be  a  truth- 
seeker  equally  as  earnest,  equally  as  conscientious, 
as  they  are.  His  search  to  know  the  things  of 
God  may  be  fully  as  keen  and  as  unremitting  as 
theirs,  and  the  voices  of  the  spirit  may  ring  just 
as  resonantly  in  his  soul  as  in  theirs.  But,  while 
they  debate  and  discuss  truth,  and  strive  to  express 
their  conclusions  in  such  intellectual  clearness 
and  definiteness  of  phrase  as  to  appeal  wholly  to 
the  mind  and  win  its  assent,  he,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  an  announcer  of  truth,  and  endeavors, 
if  he  have  any  conscious  purpose,  to  transfer  a 
mood  of  mind  and  soul  to  the  mind  and  soul  of 

the  reader.     Hence,  one  may  rather  expect  from 

83 


84  SIDNEY  LANIER 

the  poet  a  certain  quality  of  vagueness,  be  aware 
rather  of  the  presence  of  the  truth  in  its  power 
than  of  a  purely  intellectual  comprehension  of  it. 
But  this  lack  of  definiteness  of  statement  and  this 
indirect  rather  than  direct  appeal  to  the  intellect 
in  no  wise  diminish  the  force  of  the  poet's  call  to 
the  spiritual  nature,  nor  detract  from  the  essen 
tial  value  of  his  message  as  a  revelation  of  spiritual 
truth.  All  the  world's  great  teachers  of  spiritual 
truth  have  uttered  their  thought  more  or  less  in 
this  way.  The  truth  has  been  so  clear  to  them, 
they  have  been  so  completely  possessed  by  its 
radiant  power,  it  has  burst  in  upon  them  with  such 
a  shining  glory  as  if  the  very  God  spoke  to  them 
with  his  own  voice  and  honored  them  with  his 
presence,  that  they  have  not  halted  to  question 
and  discuss,  nor  to  follow  the  plodding  paths  of 
slow-footed  logic,  but  have  shouted  aloud  what 
they  saw  in  their  moods  of  mystical  spiritual 
exaltation. 

But  if  there  is  this  wide  difference  in  the  mood 
of  mind  and  the  general  nature  of  the  utterance 
of  the  poet  as  compared  with  that  of  the  theolo 
gian  and  philosopher,  the  difference  is  even  greater 
when  we  come  to  compare  the  technical  form  and 
the  verbal  manner  of  his  utterance  with  theirs. 
By  the  penetrative  insight  of  the  imagination  he 
sees  truth  rather  than  discovers  it  by  the  patient 


GOD  IN  THE  WORLD  85 

processes  of  thought.  It  bursts  on  him  as  a  kind 
of  revelation,  and  his  high  task  is  to  light  the  same 
fires  in  the  imagination  of  the  reader.  Conse 
quently,  his  vision  of  truth  takes  on  the  form  of 
symbolism.  A  purely  intellectual  view  of  it  is  to 
him  a  lifeless  skeleton,  and  his  mission  is  to  clothe 
it  with  warm  and  rounded  flesh,  and  breathe  into 
it  the  breath  of  life.  "And  the  Word  was  made 
flesh,  and  dwelt  among  us,  and  we  saw  his  glory," 
represents  fittingly  and  nobly  the  final  achievement 
of  the  poet  at  his  best  in  the  handling  of  truth. 
His  method,  therefore,  is  to  make  it  vital  in  the 
form  of  a  symbol  which  the  imagination  can 
seize.  So  when  one  studies  a  poem  as  an  expres 
sion  of  truth,  one  must  realize  that  it  is  brought 
home  to  us  by  hint  and  suggestion  through  the 
form  of  the  story,  the  allegory,  or  the  parable. 
This  was  the  method  of  the  Great  Teacher. 

Moreover,  to  the  poet  truth  is  beauty  and 
beauty  is  truth.  His  message  comes  to  the  world 
in  all  loveliness  of  form  and  melody.  It  sings  its 
way  into  the  hearts  of  men,  and  lives  in  their 
imaginations  a  joy  forever  because  it  is  a  thing  of 
beauty.  It  thus  satisfies  the  emotions  and  com 
forts  the  spirit  as  no  purely  intellectual  appeal 
can  possibly  do.  Now,  this  power  quite  vanishes 
when  we  demand  of  the  poet  a  clear-cut  definition 
of  the  exact  nature  of  the  truth  he  utters  and  a 


86  SIDNEY  LANIER 

logical  statement  of  his  faith.  We  must  accept 
what  he  says  in  his  own  mood  and  manner — the 
mood  of  a  soul  aflame  with  the  light  of  spiritual 
truth  expressed  in  the  symbolic  terms  of  beauty. 
Vague  and  mystical  it  may  be,  and  hard  to  set 
down  in  such  prosaic  definiteness  as  will  satisfy 
the  demands  of  the  mind,  yet  none  the  less  strong 
is  it  to  fortify  the  soul  and  direct  it  along  the 
ways  that  lead  to  God. 

It  is  necessary  to  keep  all  this  in  mind  when 
we  attempt  to  express  in  plain  prose,  with  more 
or  less  clearness,  the  nature  of  Lanier's  faith  and 
his  thought  of  God  in  the  world.  For  his  faith  is 
sure  and  strong,  and  in  his  most  serious  inter 
pretation  of  life  he  never  left  out  an  abiding 
consciousness  of  the  divine  planning  and  pres 
ence.  From  this  standpoint  he  is  to  be  reckoned 
among  those  sons  of  spiritual  light  who,  in  an 
age  of  faith  sorely  tried  and  darkened,  yet  heard 
the  voice  of  God  and  saw  him  in  all  the  tangled 
confusions  of  life  and  thought.  This  is  his  pre 
vailing  mood.  It  is  the  finer  breath  of  all  his 
poetry,  touching  it  with  a  heartening  sense  of 
faith  and  lighting  it  with  a  steady  spiritual  radi 
ance.  However  hard  we  might  find  it  to  state 
in  definite  terms  just  what  Lanier  believed,  one 
is  unfailingly  conscious  that  his  face  was  toward 
God,  wistful  yet  trustful,  and  that  his  soul  was 


GOD  IN  THE  WORLD  87 

strong  with  the  sense  of  divine  communion.  To 
him  this  was  no  godless  world;  but  it  was  a 
God-informed,  a  God-directed  world.  And  it  is 
the  greatness  of  this  conception  that  gives  to 
Lanier's  poetry  its  loftiness  of  mood  aside  from 
any  technical  value  it  may  or  may  not  have,  and 
the  unwavering  strength  of  it  acts  like  a  spiritual 
tonic  upon  the  drooping  soul. 

Perhaps  in  no  other  single  poem  does  Lanier 
express  so  clearly  and  with  so  deep  a  passion  of 
aspiration  as  in  "A  Florida  Sunday"  the  essential 
nature  of  his  religious  faith.  There  is  no  narrow 
ness  to  it;  it  is  all-embracing  in  its  compass.  In 
the  "divine  Tranquillity"  of  that  sunny  land, 
kissed  and  wooed  by  softest  airs, 

God,  of  His  most  gracious  friendliness, 
Hath  wrought  that  every  soul,  this  loving  morn, 
Into  all  things  may  be  new-corporate  born, 
And  each  live  whole  in  all. 

Thus  the  poet's  soul  melts  into  loving  com 
munion  with  all  nature — with  bird,  and  flower, 
and  tree,  the  "long  lissome  coast,"  the  bending 
sky  overhead,  the  wide  expanse  of  the  sounding 
sea,  and 

All  riches,  goods,  and  braveries  never  told 
Of  earth,  sun,  air,   and  heaven — now  I  hold 
Your  being  in  my  being. 

But  more  than  this,  all  leads  toward  God,  and 
all  is  God.  Nothing  is  detached  from  this  blessed 


88  SIDNEY  LANIER 

fellowship  of  spiritual  oneness;  each  has  its  place 
in  the  all-encompassing  wholeness  of  the  divine 
plan;  and  the  poet's  personality  blends  completely 
and  tenderly  into  this  larger  wholeness  with  a 
mystical  passion  of  piety: 

I  am  ye, 

And  ye  myself;  yea,  lastly,  Thee, 
God,  whom  my  roads  all  reach,  howe'er  they  run, 
My  Father,  Friend,  Beloved,  dear  All-One. 
Thee  in  my  soul,  my  soul  in  Thee,  I  feel, 
Self  of  my  self.     Lo,  through  my  sense  doth  steal 
Clear  cognizance  of  all  selves  and  qualities, 
Of  all  existence  that  hath  been  or  is, 
Of  all  strange  haps  that  men  miscall  of  chance, 
And  all  the  works  of  tireless  circumstance. 

So  perfect  is  the  spiritual  harmony  of  this  mood, 
and  so  clear  is  this  vision  of  his  faith  in  the 
divine  ordering  of  all  things,  that  even  the  dis 
cords  of  life,  clashing  and  clanging  here  and  there, 
cannot  disturb  the  harmony,  nor  all  the  low- 
hanging  darkness  blind  the  vision  of  faith.  Into 
that  still  air  may  break  unseemly  noises;  the 
world  may  be  apparently  going  quite  awry;  yet 
he  is  not  moved: 

Out  of  the  North  come  quarrels,  and  keen  blare 
Of  challenge  by  the  hot-breath'd  parties  blown; 
Yet  break  they  not  this  peace  with  alien  tone, 
Fray  not  my  heart,  nor  fright  me  for  my  land. 

To  one  without  spiritual  insight  and  under 
standing  the  sounds  of  the  present  are  but  jan 
gling  noises,  out  of  tune  and  harsh.  But  in  it  all 


GOD  IN  THE  WORLD  89 

the  poet  hears  a  deeper  melody.     For  between  her 
wings  the  "great  bird  Purpose"  bears  him,  and 

I  am  one  with  all  the  kinsmen  things 
That  e'er  my  Father  fathered.     Oh,  to  me 
All  questions  solve  in  this  tranquillity: 
E'en  this  dark  matter,  once  so  dim,  so  drear, 
Now  shines  upon  my  spirit  heavenly-clear: 
Thou  Father,  without  logic,  tellest  me 
How  this  divine  denial  true  may  be, 
— How  All's  in  each,  yet  every  one  of  all 
Maintains  his  Self  complete  and  several. 

With  the  pure  spiritual  quality  of  the  message 
of  such  a  faith  ringing  in  one's  thought  one  must 
set  Lanier,  at  least  in  purpose,  high  among  those 
seers  of  the  race  whose  clear  eyes  of  vision  for 
the  larger  Purpose  nothing  could  blur,  and  among 
the  sons  of  light  whose  walk  was  close  with  God. 
The  quality  of  his  utterance  may  not  have  that 
all  but  clamorous  assertiveness  and  loud  resonance 
that  belong  to  Browning's  militant  expression  of 
faith.  Yet  it  is  none  the  less  strong  and  clear. 
If  his  eyes  look  with  a  kind  of  wistfulness  to  find 
the  law  and  the  very  presence  of  God  in  the 
apparent  chaos  of  human  life  and  destiny,  they 
are  yet  unblurred  and  are  lighted  with  the  steady 
radiance  of  a  perfect  trust.  To  his  ears  the  clang 
ing  din  and  the  clashing  discords  of  the  confused 
world  about  him  resolved  themselves  into  an 
harmonious  symphony,  directed  by  the  Divine 
Mind  and  the  Divine  Love.  He  trusted,  there- 


90  SIDNEY  LANIER 

fore,  the  Larger  Hope  in  the  wider  course  of  human 
events,  and  rested  securely  upon  the  beneficence 
of  the  one  increasing  Purpose. 

Moreover,  as  the  poet  thus  faced  the  huge  teas 
ing  problem  of  the  general  life  and  dauntlessly 
trusted  the  Larger  Hope,  so  also  he  faced  the 
shadow  that  sits  and  waits  by  all  life,  individual 
and  collective — Death.  In  its  presence  he  lived, 
and  one  wonders  increasingly  at  the  brave  joy- 
ance  of  his  song  when  one  considers  how  that  it 
all  might  have  been  darkened  by  the  murky  gloom 
of  ever-impending  death.  But  not  so.  Reso 
lutely  he  turned  his  eyes  upon  it,  and  with  the 
vision  of  faith  saw  quite  through  the  shadow  into 
the  glory  beyond  it.  In  a  curious  little  poem  he 
fancies  Death  to  be  "a  huge  omnivorous  Toad 
grim  squatting  on  a  twilight  road," — 

He  catcheth  all  that  Circumstance 

Hath  tossed  to  him. 
He  curseth  all  who  upward  glance 

As  lost  to  him. 

He  was  in  the  garden  in  the  fair  morning  of  time, 
and  strange  was  it  that  he  was  present  to  mar 
that  perfect  loveliness: 

O  dainty  dew,  O  morning  dew 

That  gleamed  in  the  world's  first  dawn,  did  you 

And  the  sweet  grass  and  manful  oaks 

Give  lair  and  rest 
To  him  who  toadwise  sits  and  croaks 

His  death-behest? 


GOD  IN  THE  WORLD  91 

But  still,   "Who  fears   the  hungry  Toad?"   the 

poet  asks. 

Not  II 

He  but  unfetters  me  to  fly. 

And 

Pilgrims,  Christ  will  walk  ahead 
And  clear  the  road. 

Moreover,  when  the  "Raven  days"  of  the  sor 
row  of  bereavement  came  croaking  stridently  in 
the  gloom  of  death,  whither  shall  we  turn  ?  Out 
of  despair  and  anguish  upward  shall  we  look, 
and  behold, 

High  above  a  glittering  calm 
Of  sea  and  sky  and  kingly  sun, 

the  one  who  was  taken 

shines  and  smiles,  and  waves  a  palm — 
And  now  we  wish — Thy  will  be  done! 

But  we  pass  with  the  poet  from  the  more  per 
sonal  aspects  of  the  presence  of  death  in  life  to 
view  it  in  relation  to  the  larger  course  of  human 
experience.  It  then  becomes  the  great  transform 
ing,  renovating  power,  healing  the  world's  old 
scars,  curing  its  manifold  diseases,  and  washing  it 
clean  of  its  sins.  At  first  along  the  stream  of  life 

Light  winds   from  over  the  moorland  sink  and  shiver 
And  sigh  as  if  just  blown  across  a  grave. 

And  then  I  pause  and  listen  to  this  sighing. 

I  look  with  strange  eyes  on  the  well-known  stream. 
I  hear  wild  birth-cries  uttered  by  the  dying. 

I  know  men  waking  who  appear  to  dream. 


92  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Then  from  the  water-lilies  slow  uprises 

The  still  vast  face  of  all  the  life  I  know, 
Changed  now,  and  full  of  wonders  and  surprises, 

With  fire  in  eyes  that  once  were  glazed  with  snow. 

Fair  now  the  brows  old  Pain  had  erewhile  wrinkled, 
And  peace  and  strength  about  the  calm  mouth  dwell. 

Clean  of  the  ashes  that  Repentance  sprinkled, 
The  meek  head  poises  like  a  flower-bell. 

All  the  old  scars  of  wanton  wars  are  vanished ; 

And  what  blue  bruises  grappling  Sense  had  left 
And  sad  remains  of  redder  stains  are  banished, 

And  the  dim  blotch  of  heart-committed  theft. 

O  still  vast  vision  of  transfigured  features 

Unvisited  by  secret  crimes  or  dooms, 
Remain,  remain  amid  these  water-creatures, 

Stand,  shine  among  yon  water-lily  blooms. 

For  eighteen  centuries  ripple  down  the  river, 
And  windy  times  the  stalks  of  empire  wave, 

— Let  the  winds  come  from  the  moor  and  sigh  and  shiver, 
Fain,  fain  am  I,  O  Christ,  to  pass  the  grave. 

Whatever  this  curious  and  strangely  wrought  poem 
may  mean,  we  are  sure,  from  it,  that  the  poet's 
faith  had  found  the  Resurrection  and  the  Life. 

Lanier  is  thus  a  bearer  of  spiritual  light  and  a 
genuine  apostle  of  optimism.  While  he  is  rarely 
ever  a  strenuous  fighter  for  the  faith  that  is  in 
him,  yet  now  and  again  he  takes  his  cast  at  the 
pessimism  of  doubt  and  death  and  the  darkness 
of  unfaith.  Sometimes  his  method  is  fantastical 
and  his  manner  of  utterance  a  bit  whimsical. 
Nevertheless,  his  voice  rings  clear  enough  and  his 


GOD  IN  THE  WORLD  93 

intent  is  true  and  brave.  For  example,  in  "Owl 
against  Robin"  we  have  a  fine  piece  of  satire,  in 
which  the  philosophy  of  gloom  is  stated  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  owl.  The  moping  bird  of  night 
complains  that  the  robin  does  wrong  to  sing  so 
joyfully  in  the  bright  light  of  day;  night  is  the 
time  for  both  work  and  play;  why  should  Sir 
Robin  keep  up  his  perpetual  song  of  cheer  ?  How 
can  we  owls  sleep  ? 

Peep!  you  whistle,  and  cheep!  cheep!  cheep! 
Oh,  peep,  if  you  will,  and  buy,  if  'tis  cheap, 
And  have  done;  for  an  owl  must  sleep. 
Are  ye  singing  for  fame,  and  who  shall  be  first? 
Each  day's  the  same,  yet  the  last  is  worst, 
And  the  summer  is  cursed  with  the  silly  outburst 
Of  idiot  redbreasts  peeping  and  cheeping 
By  day,  when  all  honest  birds  ought  to  be  sleeping. 
Lord,  what  a  din!  And  so  out  of  all  reason. 
Have  ye  not  heard  that  each  thing  hath  its  season? 
Night  is  to  work  in,  night  is  for  playtime; 
Good  heavens,  not  daytime! 

It  is  far  better 

To  flit  down  the  shadow-shot- with-gleam, 

Betwixt  hanging  leaves  and  starlit  stream, 

Hither,  thither,  to  and  fro, 

Silent,  aimless,  dayless,  slow 

(Aimless?  Field-mice?     True,  they're  slain; 

But  the  night-philosophy  hoots  at  pain, 

Grips,  eats  quick,  and  drops  the  bones 

In  the  water  beneath  the  bough,  nor  moans 

At  the  death  life  feeds  on).     Robin,  pray 

Come  away,  come  away 
To  the  cultus  of  night. 


94  SIDNEY  LANIER 

But  for  such  a  philosophy  there  can  be  no  place 
in  the  clear  light  of  Lanier's  soul.  His  is  the 
philosophy  of  Day,  a  philosophy  lit  with  the  light 
of  faith.  Even  as  he  looked  toward  the  future 
out  of  the  gloom  of  a  baffling  and  shadow-hung 
experience,  the  bird  that  he  loosened  from  the 
ark  of  his  life  upon  the  gray  wastes  of  the  present 
was  a  bird  of  promise  ("A  Song  of  the  Future") : 

Go,  trembling  song, 
And  stay  not  long;  oh,  stay  not  long: 
Thou'rt  only  a  gray  and  sober  dove, 
But  thine  eye  is  faith  and  thy  wing  is  love. 

Moreover,  to  the  eye  of  faith  even  the  dark  of 
life  has  its  ennobling  uses,  and  we  need  not  com 
plain  at  it  nor  of  it.  In  such  an  attitude  one 
discovers  the  surest  test  of  the  genuinely  spiritual 
quality  of  a  poet's  temperament  and  the  clearest 
revelation  of  the  strength  of  his  faith.  If  he 
mopes  and  whines,  one  may  be  sure  that  there  is 
languor  of  spirit  and  feebleness  of  faith.  Nobly, 
however,  does  Lanier  stand  this  final  test.  Hear 
him  sing  the  uses  of  the  dark  of  life  ("Opposition") : 

The  dark  hath  many  dear  avails; 

The  dark  distills  divinest  dews; 
The  dark  is  rich  with  nightingales, 

With  dreams,  and  with  the  heavenly  muse. 

Of  fret,  of  dark,  of  thorn,  of  chill, 

Complain  thou  not,  O  heart;  for  these 

Bank-in  the  current  of  the  will 
To  uses,  arts,  and  charities. 


GOD  IN  THE  WORLD  95 

To  these  high  uses,  therefore,  of  the  pain  and 
sorrow  and  disappointments  of  life  he  shut  not 
his  eyes,  but  received  them  as  a  part  of  the  neces 
sary  discipline  for  the  ennobling  and  enriching 
of  character.  The  very  splendor  of  the  rose 
brings  some  such  conception  to  his  mind  ("Rose- 
Morals"): 

Would  that  my  songs  might  be 

What  roses  make  by  day  and  might — 
Distillments  of  my  clod  of  misery 
Into  delight. 

It  must  be  remembered,  too,  when  we  consider 
the  brave  quality  of  Lanier's  large  faith  and  the 
triumphant  courage  of  his  optimism,  that  he  knew 
in  very  truth  the  dark  of  life.  To  get  anything 
like  the  full  and  rare  beauty  of  his  hold  on  God  in 
all  the  concerns  of  his  own  personal  experience 
and  in  his  interpretation  of  the  wider  course  of 
human  history,  we  need  always  to  hold  in  mind 
some  of  those  grim  comrades  that  walked  ever 
with  him  along  the  way  of  life — wasting  disease, 
cramping  conditions,  disappointments  without 
number,  lack  of  recognition,  and  a  dire  poverty 
that  threatened  at  times  to  transform  the  soaring 
poet  into  a  plodding  hackwriter.  "June  Dreams, 
in  January"  gives  us  a  hint  of  how  fierce,  at  times, 
the  battle  in  the  poet's  soul  was  to  hold  himself 
true  to  his  faith  in  the  highest  within  and  without. 


g6  SIDNEY  LANIER 

He  could  not  always  fight  off  "old  Scorn  and 
Bitterness,"  who, 

Like  Hunnish  kings  out  of  the  barbarous  land, 

came 

And  camped  upon  the  transient  Italy 
That  he  had  dreamed  to  blossom  in  his  soul. 

The  poet  sees  wealth  and  luxury  and  avarice 
on  every  hand;  but  he  and  his  sit  in  poverty, 
and  he  is  unable  to  transmute  dreams  of  beauty 
into  bread  for  wife  and  little  ones.  These  are 
conditions  that  test  the  quality  of  his  faith  and 
optimism : 

"Read  me,"  he  cried,  and  rose,  and  stamped  his  foot 

Impatiently  at  Heaven,   "  read  me  this  " 

(Putting  th'  inquiry  full  in  the  face  of  God) — 

"Why  can  we  poets  dream  us  beauty,  so, 

But  cannot  dream  us  bread?     Why,  now,  can  I 

Make,  aye,  create  this  fervid  throbbing  June 

Out  of  the  chill,  chill  matter  of  my  soul, 

Yet  cannot  make  a  poorest  penny  loaf 

Out  of  this  same  chill  matter,  no,  not  one 

For  Mary  though  she  starved  upon  my  breast?" 

And  then  he  fell  upon  his  couch,  and  sobbed, 

And,  late,  just  when  his  heart  leaned  o'er 

The  very  edge  of  breaking,  fain  to  fall, 

God  sent  him  sleep. 

Thus  there  is  no  doubt  but  that  in  the  very  depth 
of  his  soul  he  questioned  God  of  the  sharp  and 
bitter  contrast  between  his  high  aiming  and  the 
low,  baffling  circumstances  that  beat  him  persist- 


GOD  IN  THE  WORLD  97 

ently  from  his  goal.  It  is  worth  while  to  repeat 
his  own  lines,  for  surely  he  is  that 

catholic  man  who  hath  mightily  won 
God  out  of  knowledge  and  good  out  of  infinite  pain. 

All  the  more  heartening,  therefore,  is  the  quality 
of  the  faith  and  the  optimism  that  throb  in  his 
message  when  we  realize  out  of  what  experiences 
they  came  and  how  they  were  tested  and  steadied 
and  disciplined.  It  is  well  to  set  here  a  prose- 
fragment  of  his  to  help  us  realize  vividly  how 
that,  to  whatever  fixedness  of  faith  he  may  have 
arrived,  he  arrived  by  the  hard  road  of  question 
ing  the  very  ways  of  God.  "In  the  lily,  the  sun 
set,  the  mountain,  and  the  rosy  hues  of  all  life, 
it  is  easy,"  he  says,  "to  trace  God.  But  it  is  in 
the  dust  that  goes  up  from  the  unending  battle 
of  things  that  we  lose  him.  Forever  through 
the  ferocities  of  storms,  the  malice  of  never-glut 
ted  oceans,  the  savagery  of  human  wars,  the  in 
exorable  barbarities  of  accident,  of  earthquake, 
and  mysterious  disease,  one  hears  the  voice  of 
man  crying,  'Where  art,  thou,  my  dear  Lord  and 
Master?'" 

Besides,  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that  his  faith 
and  optimism  came  not  of  a  temperament  so 
essentially  mystic  that  it  yielded  easily  to  a  more 
or  less  blind  pious  musing  on  God  and  Providence, 
or  from  a  cast  of  mind  that  blinked  the  intellectual 


98  SIDNEY  LANIER 

side  of  the  spirit's  quest  to  realize  God  in  itself 
and  to  accept  him  in  the  ordering  of  human 
history  and  the  general  progress  of  the  race.  As 
we  have  seen,  he  had,  to  a  remarkable  degree, 
the  modern  passion  of  intellectual  inquiry  and  an 
equally  stubborn  sense  of  the  sheer  facts  of  life. 
He  hid  himself  in  no  land-locked,  storm-protected 
haven  of  thought,  but  sought  bravely  to  launch 
out  into  the  tidal  movement  of  the  mystery  and 
complexity  of  things;  with  wide,  eager  eyes  for 
truth,  dauntlessly  he  fared  to  find  God  for  him 
self,  and  to  discover  him  and  his  ways  in  the  wild 
and  confused  tangle  of  modern  conditions.  Hence 
it  is  that  the  mere  story  of  his  life,  the  bare  record 
of  his  thought,  the  final  message  of  his  poetry,  all 
represent  the  inspiring  struggle  upward,  through 
dark  and  devious  ways,  of  a  soul  to  the  far,  fair 
heights  where  God  is  Sun  and  King.  All  the  more 
stimulating,  therefore,  we  repeat,  is  the  quality 
of  his  faith  and  optimism.  For  we  know  that 
he  is  of  those  who  have  come  up  into  the  light 
through  much  trial  and  tribulation;  we  know  that 
he  had  his  grim  specters  of  the  mind,  and  van 
quished  them.  How  truly  and  sternly  he  set  his 
inquiring  face  toward  all  that  might  enfeeble 
faith  and  blur  and  distort  the  vision  as  to  the 
actual  presence  of  God  in  the  world  may  be  seen 
in  these  verses  from  the  poem  to  Bayard  Taylor: 


GOD  IN  THE  WORLD  99 

The  cross  of  love,  the  wrench  of  faith,  the  shame 
Of  science  that  cannot  prove  proof  is,  the  twist 

Of  blame  for  praise  and  bitter  praise  for  blame, 
The  silly  stake  and  tether  round  the  wrist 

By  fashion  fixed,  the  virtue  that  doth  claim 
The  gains  of  vice,  the  lofty  mark  that's  missed 

By  all  the  mortal  space  'twixt  heaven  and  hell, 
The  soul's  sad  growth  o'er  stationary  friends 

Who  hear  us  from  our  height  not  well,  not  well, 
The  slant  of  accident,  the  sudden  bends 

Of  purpose  tempered  strong,  the  gambler's  spell, 
The  son's  disgrace,  the  plan  that  e'er  depends 

On  other's  plots,  the  tricks  that  passion  plays 
(I  loving  you,  you  him,  he  none  at  all), 

The  artist's  pain — to  walk  his  blood-stained  ways, 
A  special  soul,  yet  judged  as  general — 

The  endless  grief  of  art,  the  sneer  that  slays, 

The  war,  the  wound,  the  groan,  the  funeral  pall — 

Not  into  these,  bright  spirit,  do  we  yearn 
To  bring  thee  back,  but  oh,  to  be,  to  be 

Unbound  of  all  these  gyves,  to  stretch,  to  spurn 
The  dark  from  off  our  dolorous  lids,  to  see 

Our  spark,  Conjecture,  blaze  and  sunwise  burn, 
And  suddenly  to  stand  again  by  thee ! 

And  thus  the  message  of  his  song  throughout  is, 
he  tried  to  see  all,  he  trusted  God,  and  was  not 
afraid.  This  is  the  masterword  out  of  the  deeps 
of  his  soul;  this  is  the  clear,  quiet  harbor  of  faith 
in  which  the  ship  of  his  thought  finally  anchors 
after  all  the  storms  have  beaten  upon  it  and  all 
the  cross-currents  have  tried  to  shift  it  from  its 
true  course. 


VII 

THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE 

WE  have  seen  with  what  resolute  courage 
Lanier  faced  the  teasing  problems  of  life,  how 
that  he  blinked  none  of  its  ugly  facts,  nor  shut 
his  eyes  to  its  confusing  contradictions.  We  have 
found  that  he  was  no  mere  purist  withrawing  him 
self  into  a  kind  of  moral  hermitage,  blind  to  life's 
sin  and  shame  and  wrong;  nor  was  he  wholly  a 
mystical  idealist,  dreaming  in  a  fair  but  shadowy 
world  of  pure  and  perfect  beauty.  He  was  rather, 
in  a  sense,  with  all  his  passion  for  the  utter  love 
liness  of  spiritual  truth,  a  realist  who,  within  his 
limitations,  saw  life  steadily,  and  saw  it  whole. 
But,  seeing  it  steadily  and  seeing  it  whole,  he 
sought  also  to  reconcile  its  contradictions,  discover 
order  in  its  apparent  chaos,  find  a  plan  in  its  wild 
confusion,  and  resolve  its  discords  into  harmony. 
In  it  all  he  heard  the  voice  of  God  and  realized 
his  presence.  The  truth  thus  revealed  he  an 
nounced  with  the  ardor  of  a  faith  that  was  strong 
and  an  optimism  that  was  unshaken. 

But  the  faith  and  the  optimism  that  come  even 
from  a  realized  sense  of  God  in  the  individual 
soul  and  in  the  larger  life  and  plan  of  the  world 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  101 

do  not  of  themselves  quite  satisfy.  They  do  not 
wholly  solve  the  problems  of  life.  They  may 
bring  a  kind  of  comfort  to  a  sorely  troubled  soul, 
or  simply  hold  it  secure  to  its  anchorage  in  the 
storms  and  cross-currents  of  circumstance.  It  is 
not  enough  that  we  shall  merely  realize  God  in 
the  world.  We  shall  go  even  further,  and  boldly 
assume  to  assert  how  he  works,  affirming  by  what 
law  or  laws  of  his  we  may  best  solve  the  problems 
of  the  world,  or  get  closest  to  the  purpose  of  the 
Divine  Mind  in  carrying  out  his  plans  for  the 
amelioration  and  progress  of  the  race.  In  this 
attitude  we  are  leaving  the  passive  side  of  faith 
and  becoming  active  agents  in  making  the  will 
of  God  prevail.  Now,  with  Tennyson  and  Brown 
ing,  Lanier  found  the  one  sure  expression  of  the 
divine  will  to  be  in  the  law  of  love.  In  its  appli 
cation  all  problems,  if  solved  at  all,  were  to  be 
solved. 

Lanier,  then,  becomes  one  more  beautiful  apos 
tle  of  the  gospel  of  love.  We  know  that  in  his 
soul  there  was  ever  an  unquenched  yearning 
toward  the  highest  things.  Nothing  seemed 
quite  to  daunt  this  passionate  aspiration  of  his. 
Whatever  he  touched,  if  he  did  not  adorn  it, 
he  made  at  least  vital  with  an  upward-tending 
energy.  But  this  spiritual  idealism  never  got  far 
from  his  thought  of  love  as  the  cure  for  all  diseases, 


IO2  SIDNEY  LANIER 

the  balm  for  every  ill,  the  reconciler  of  all  contra 
dictions,  and  the  perfect  solvent  of  every  dark 
problem.  We  know  with  what  gracious  and 
generous  tenderness  his  heart  took  to  itself  all 
that  was  beautiful  in  nature  and  art,  and  all  that 
was  fair  in  human  fellowship.  In  his  intercourse 
with  men,  of  both  high  and  low  degree,  he  loved 
and  was  lovable.  And  when  he  turned  his  deep 
est  thought  upon  the  world  it  was  to  pour  out  a 
nothing-withholding  largess  of  affection,  and  to 
plead  in  love  for  love.  To  him,  it  is  not  knowl 
edge  that  the  world  needs,  but  love;  not  head,  but 
heart.  The  time  in  which  he  lived  was  a  period 
in  which  men  where  turning  with  an  all-absorb 
ing  zeal  to  the  endeavor  to  know  things,  and  the 
accumulation  of  facts  was  the  chief  intellectual 
goal.  Cold,  keen,  analytical  mind  sat  enthroned  as 
lord  over  all,  and  heart,  tender  with  love,  was  shut 
out  of  the  house  of  life.  It  was  a  part  of  Lanier's 
mission  as  a  poet  to  plead  with  generous  ardor 
the  cause  of  love,  to  call  the  time  away  from  its 
worship  of  knowledge,  and  emancipate  it  from 
the  tyranny  of  mind.  Love,  therefore,  he  would 
restore  to  all  human  relationships — social,  politi 
cal,  commercial,  and  industrial.  In  this  effort 
one  finds  his  most  dominant  passion;  with  it  his 
song  is  always  warm  and  vital.  If  he  saw  God 
in  nature  and  recognized  him  in  the  larger  plan 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  103 

of  the  world,  if  he  felt  that  all  was  law,  even  more 
deeply  he  felt  that  all  was  love. 

Now  let  us  draw  from  the  poet  his  more  or  less 
definite  and  specific  interpretation  of  his  concep 
tion  of  love  as  applied  to  the  problem  of  life. 
We  begin  with  one  of  his  very  earliest  poems,  a 
poem  written  in  1862  in  the  midst  of  the  blood 
shed  and  necessary  horrors  of  war.  The  young 
poet  saw  in  vision  a  tournament.  It  was  a  joust 
to  the  death  between  two  gallant  knights,  Heart 
and  Brain: 

Bright  shone  the  lists,  blue  bent  the  skies, 
And  the  knights  still  hurried  amain 

To  the  tournament  under  the  ladies'  eyes, 
Where  the  jousters  were  Heart  and  Brain. 

The  one  was  a  youth  clad  in  "crimson  and  gold"; 
the  other,  Brain,  "stood  apart,  steel-armored, 
dark  and  cold."  It  was  a  bitter,  cruel  combat  in 
which  both  must  suffer,  as  must  always  be  the 
case  when  heart  and  brain,  mind  and  love,  are 
at  war: 

They  charged,  they  struck;  both  fell,  both  bled. 

Brain  rose  again,  ungloved, 
Heart,  dying,  smiled  and  faintly  said, 

" My  love  to  my  beloved! " 

This  is  the  poet's  quaintly  beautiful  and  pa 
thetic  protest  against  the  unseemly  strife  then  on 
between  brothers.  Though  a  soldier,  gallant  and 
true,  he  felt  that  the  political  theories  born  in 


104  SIDNEY  LANIER 

the  minds  of  men  had  slain  the  very  love  of  their 
hearts;  and,  wholly  loyal  in  meeting  his  every 
duty  as  a  patriotic  son  of  his  section,  yet  nothing 
could  make  war  seem  to  him  other  than  the 
overthrow  of  that  love  which  should  rule  the 
world.  This  is  the  mood  and  attitude  which  he 
expresses  elsewhere  in  prose:  "The  early  spring 
of  1 86 1  brought  to  bloom,  besides  innumerable 
violets  and  jessamines,  a  strange,  enormous,  and 
terrible  flower!  This  was  the  blood-red  flower  of 
war,  which  grows  amid  thunders;  a  flower  whose 
freshening  dews  are  blood  and  hot  tears,  whose 
shadow  chills  a  land,  whose  odors  strangle  a 
people,  whose  giant  petals  droop  downward,  and 
whose  roots  are  in  hell.  It  is  a.  species  of  the 
great  genus,  sin-flower,  which  is  so  conspicuous 
in  the  flora  of  all  ages  and  all  countries,  and 
whose  multifarious  leafage  and  fruitage  so  far 
overgrow  a  land  that  the  violet,  or  love  genus,  has 
often  small  chance  to  show  its  quiet  blue."  His 
protest,  therefore,  is  that  it  dwarfs  or  destroys 
the  "love  genus." 

Let  us  return  to  the  little  poem.  Three  years 
go  by.  The  grim  death-grapple  of  brothers  is  at 
an  end,  and  the  young  soldier-poet,  fresh  from 
the  pain  and  the  bitterness  of  it,  broken  in  health, 
facing  the  dread  blackness  of  ruin  and  walking 
blindly  in  the  devious  paths  of  strange  and  unfa- 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  105 

miliar  conditions,  sees  yet  another  tournament. 
This  time  the  two  knights  are  Love  and  Hate. 
Hate  spurs  furiously  on  to  meet  his  gentle  antag 
onist.  But 

Love's  gray  eyes  glow  with  a  heaven-heat, 

Love  lifts  his  hand  in  a  saintly  prayer; 
Look!  Hate  hath  fallen  at  his  feet! 

Look!  Hate  hath  vanished  in  the  air! 

Then  all  the  throng  looked  kind  on  all; 

Eyes  yearned,  lips  kissed,  dumb  souls  were  freed; 
Two  magic  maids'  hands  lifted  a  pall 

And  the  dead  knight,  Heart,  sprang  on  his  steed. 

Then  Love  cried,  "Break  me  his  lance,  each  knight! 

Ye  shall  fight  for  blood-athirst  Fame  no  more!" 
And  the  knights  all  doffed  their  mailed  might 

And  dealt  out  dole  on  dole  to  the  poor. 

Then  dove-flights  sanctified  the  plain, 

And  hawk  and  sparrow  shared  a  nest. 
And  the  great  sea  opened  and  swallowed  Pain, 

And  out  of  this  water-grave  floated  Rest! 

Thus  in  the  beautiful  conception  of  these  two 
early  companion-poems  we  have  the  keynote  of 
much  of  Lanier's  philosophy  of  life.  What  the 
sad  old  world  most  needed  was  Heart,  not  Head, 
and  the  balm  of  the  sweet  gospel  of  love.  In 
this  it  should  find  its  only  healing.  Out  of  this 
thought  grows  the  poet's  finest  and  noblest  sing 
ing.  His  song  is  the  very  chant  of  love,  reaching 
its  climacteric  note,  as  we  shall  see,  in  that  love 
which  the  Christ  himself  brought. 


io6  SIDNEY  LANIER 

We  know  with  what  all  but  ecstatic  affection 
he  loved  the  fair  mute  things  of  nature.  He 
entered  into  fellowship  with  them  as  blood  of 
their  blood  and  spirit  of  their  spirit.  The  float 
ing,  far-off  cloud  he  called  "kinsman  cloud";  he 
was  "cousin"  to  the  crimson  clover  blossoms  bow 
ing  in  the  soft  summer  breeze;  the  very  leaves  on 
the  trees  were  taken  to  his  heart  as  "friendly,  sis 
terly,  sweetheart  leaves";  he  begs  the  meadows  to 
"speak"  to  him  as  to  a  "lover";  and  he  comes  into 
the  "gospeling  glooms"  of  the  live-oaks  exclaiming, 

I  have  waked,  I  have  come,  my  beloved!  I  might  not  abide: 
I  have  come  ere  the  dawn,  O  beloved,  my  live-oaks,  to  hide 

In  your  gospeling  glooms, — to  be 
As  a  lover  in  heaven,  the  marsh  my  marsh  and  the  sea  my  sea. 

Thus  his  gospel  .of  love  was  wide  enough  and 
deep  enough  to  take  into  its  tender  compass  all 
of  God's  world.  A  cloud  floating  overhead,  warm 
in  the  sunset's  glow,  becomes  for  him  a  kind  of 
messenger  of  love,  an  Ariel  to  do  his  bidding  of 
forgiveness : 

Over  the  humped  and  fishy  sea, 

Over  the  Caliban  sea, 

O  cloud  in  the  West,  like  a  thought  in  the  heart 
Of  pardon,  loose  thy  wing,  and  start, 

And  do  a  grace  for  me. 
Over  the  huge  and  huddling  sea, 

Over  the  Caliban  sea, 

Bring  hither  my  brother  Antonio, — Man, — 
My  injurer:  night  breaks  the  ban: 

Brother,  I  pardon  thee. 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  107 

When,  in  the  "Psalm  of  the  West,"  he  essays 
to  interpret  the  real  significance  of  his  own  land, 
America,  he  sees  freedom  not  only  in  law  and  in 
political  and  social  relationships,  but  as  the  in 
spiring  and  nourishing  atmosphere  in  which  love 
shall  live  its  largest  life  and  do  its  greatest  work. 
The  crowning  consummation  of  all  the  slow-won 
progress  of  the  ages  shall  be  that  here,  under  the 
beneficent  influence  of  love,  binding  men  together 
at  last  into  a  bond  of  brotherhood,  Science  shall 
be  known 

as  the  sense  making  love  to  the  All, 
And  Art  be  known  as  the  soul  making  love  to  the  All, 
And  Love  be  known  as  the  marriage  of  man  with  the  All, — 
Till  Science  to  knowing  the  Highest  shall  lovingly  turn, 
Till  Art  to  loving  the  Highest  shall  consciously  burn, 
Till  Science  to  Art  as  a  man  to  a  woman  shall  yearn, 

— Then  morn! 

When  Faith  from  the  wedding  of  Knowing  and  Loving  shall 
purely  be  born. 

Indeed,  the  very  land  itself  is  the  final  home  of 
faith  and  love;  out  of  these  it  was  born,  and  for 
these  in  God's  good  providence  it  was  conse 
crated.  These  constitute  the  blessed,  precious 
cargo  the  Mayflower  brought: 

Mayflower,  Ship  of  Faith's  best  Hope! 
Thou  art  sure  if  all  men  grope; 
Mayflower,  Ship  of  Hope's  best  Faith! 
All  is  true  the  great  God  saith; 
Mayflower,  Ship  of  Charity! 
Love  is  Lord  of  land  and  sea. 


io8  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Oh,  with  love  and  love's  best  care 
Thy  large  godly  freightage  bear — 
Godly  Hearts  that,  Grails  of  gold, 
Still  the  blood  of  Faith  do  hold. 

This  is  the  poet's  way  of  interpreting  the  found 
ing  and  mission  of  his  country.  Others  may 
interpret  it  in  terms  of  political  equality  and  of  a 
free  play  for  social  and  industrial  opportunity,  and 
in  these  things  may  see  its  chief  glory  when  com 
pared  with  other  lands.  But  Lanier  recognizes 
all  this  and  more.  To  him  the  spiritual  values 
of  the  American  experiment  appeal.  It  is  above 
all  lands  the  land  where  a  man  has  a  better 
chance  to  work  out  his  largest  destiny  as  a  citizen 
and  a  worker,  and  express  to  the  fullest  possible 
degree  the  quality  and  quantity  of  his  manhood. 
But  best  of  all,  it  is  the  land  of  brothers,  of  faith, 
and  of  love.  And  these  things  give  it  its  chief 
glory,  and  touch  its  progress  and  its  future  destiny 
with  the  radiance  of  the  noblest  idealism.  Amer 
ica  may  not  be  what  the  poet  dreams  it  is;  tested 
by  his  thought,  it  may  be  a  stupendous  failure. 
Nevertheless,  the  beauty  of  his  conception  still 
abides  at  least  as  a  revelation  of  his  own  fine 
visioning  of  what  it  ought  to  be,  and  a  rebuke 
to  any  whose  low-thoughted  estimate  leaves  out 
of  their  idea  of  freedom  the  power  of  love  and 
faith.  Lanier  would  have  us  believe  that  here 
Love  is  Lord  of  land  and  sea. 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  109 

Thus  he  saw  his  land  lit  with  the  light  of  the 
gospel  of  love  and  her  institutions  made  noble 
and  beautiful  by  its  power.  So  largely  was  he 
himself  possessed  in  his  own  life  by  this  same 
power  that  he  tested  the  value  of  everything  by 
its  presence  or  absence.  Where  love  was  not 
there  could  be  neither  sweetness  nor  light,  but  all 
discord  and  bitterness  and  darkness.  The  faith 
of  his  own  heart  centered  in  one  woman,  and  their 
love  became  the  symbol  of  the  power  of  love 
everywhere  to  transform  into  the  perfection  of 
relationship  all  men  and  all  human  experience. 
It  had  the  further  virtue  of  so  clarifying  his 
thought  of  life  that,  in  the  dissolving  light  of 
love,  if  he  could  not  quite  understand  its  confu 
sions  and  contradictions,  he  could  yet  trust  the 
God  of  love  for  the  final  perfecting  of  the  imper 
fect  and  a  clear  reading  of  all  the  dark  riddles. 
In  this  doubting  age,  for  example,  the  heart,  the 
home  of  love,  tries  to  keep  within  the  temple 
door,  while  the  head  is  ever  peering  without,  with 
its  eyes  ranging  curiously  up  and  down  the  time 
("Acknowledgment") : 

Blinking  at  o'er-bright  science,  smit  with  desire 
To  see  and  not  to  see.     Hence,  crime  on  crime. 

Yea,  if  the  Christ  (called  thine)  now  paced  yon  street, 
Thy  half  ness  hot  with  His  rebuke  would  swell; 

Legions  of  scribes  would  rise  and  run  and  beat 
His  fair  intolerable  Wholeness  twice  to  hell. 


no  SIDNEY  LANIER 

But  to  it  all  the  voice  of  love,  and  faith  through 
love,  replies: 

Nay  (so,  dear  Heart,  thou  whisperest  in  my  soul) , 
'  Tis  a  half  time,  yet  Time  will  make  it  whole. 

Faith  is  yet  subjected  to  a  harder  test,  and  love 
again  brings  the  victory.  God  seems  to  rest 
silent  "while  Sin  creeps  grinning  through  His 
house  of  Time,"  and  vice  and  crime  stalk  their 
grim,  destroying  way  unhindered  and  unrebuked, 
and  wholeness  and  perfection  are  found  nowhere. 
Still, 

Somehow  by  thee,  dear  Love,  I  win  content: 
Thy  Perfect  stops  th'  Imperfect's  argument. 

And  resting  firmly  in  the  faith  which  this  love 
gives — a  love  which  is  the  shining  type  of  the 
larger  love  of  God — the  poet  reaches  the  sure  and 
fixed  heights  where  he  can  sing: 

Not  hardest  Fortune's  most  unbounded  stress 
Can  blind  my  soul  nor  hurl  it  from  on  high, 

Possessing  thee,  the  self  of  loftiness, 

And  very  light  that  Light  discovers  by. 

Howe'er  thou  turn'st,  wrong  Earth!  still  Love's  in  sight: 
For  we  are  taller  than  the  breadth  of  night. 

As  one  reads  such  a  poem — a  poem  in  which 
love  is  not  only  the  reconciler  but  also  the  power 
that  lifts  the  soul  to  the  larger  divine  love — one 
wonders  whether  to  any  other  American  poet  the 
love  of  one  woman  ever  meant  so  much,  ever  so 
thoroughly  spiritualized  his  emotions.  Such  a  love 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  in 

is  polar  in  its  remove  from  both  the  romantic 
sentimentalism  of  most  poets  and  the  more  or 
less  sensual  worship  of  the  eternally  feminine  of 
some  poets.  We  must  take  it  as  one  more  expres 
sion  of  the  essentially  spiritual  quality  of  Lanier's 
temperament  and  one  more  note  in  the  spiritual 
message  of  his  song.  It  becomes  to  the  poet  a 
symbol  of  the  all-embacing,  all-penetrating  divine 
love,  and  anchors  his  thought  of  life  steadily  to 
faith  amid  the  storm  and  stress  and  confusion  of 
circumstance.  In  "My  Springs*'  one  gets  a  nobly 
beautiful  chanting  of  this  mood  of  Lanier's : 

O  Love,  O  Wife,  thine  eyes  are  they, 

— My  springs  from  out  whose  shining  gray 

Issue  the  sweet  celestial  streams 

That  feed  my  life's  bright  Lake  of  Dreams. 

Oval  and  large  and  passion-pure 
And  gray  and  wise  and  honor-sure; 
Soft  as  a  dying  violet-breath 
Yet  calmly  unafraid  of  death; 

Thronged,  like  two  dove-cotes  of  gray  doves, 
With  wife's  and  mother's  and  poor-folk's  loves, 
And  home-loves  and  high  glory-loves 
And  science-loves  and  story-loves, 

And  loves  for  all  that  God  and  man 
In  art  and  nature  make  or  plan, 
And  lady-loves  for  spidery  lace 
And  broideries  and  supple  grace 

And  diamonds  and  the  whole  sweet  round 
Of  littles  that  large  life  compound, 
And  loves  for  God  and  God's  bare  truth, 
And  loves  for  Magdalen  and  Ruth, 


H2  SIDNEY  LANIER 

Dear  eyes,  dear  eyes  and  rare  complete — 
Being  heavenly-sweet  and  earthly-sweet, 
— I  marvel  that  God  made  you  mine, 
For  when  He  frowns,  'tis  then  ye  shine! 

Yet  with  all  the  soaring  strength  of  a  faith 
impelled  by  love,  if  one  were  to  seek  to  know  just 
what  definite  form  of  creed  the  poet  professed, 
into  what  pew  of  faith,  so  to  speak,  he  might  be  set 
most  comfortable,  one  would,  perhaps,  be  offend 
ing  his  deepest  thought  of  God  and  love.  To 
him  it  seemed  that  formal  hard  and  fast  state 
ments  of  creed  and  dogma,  which  separated  men 
into  sects  and  schisms,  were  the  products  of  the 
wars  of  unloving  opinion  and  of  the  strifes  of  the 
analytical  intellect.  His  spiritual  visioning,  see 
ing  in  love  the  power  to  dissolve  all  differences, 
swept  these  limitations  swiftly  away,  and  his 
heart  refused  its  loyalty  to  the  rule  of  mere 
opinion,  as  he  conceived  it,  in  matters  of  faith. 
Indeed,  he  keenly  resents  "prim  creed's'*  way  of 
defining  and  measuring,  of  trying  to  reduce  to 
a  formula  the  high  things  of  his  thought  and 
love.  In  "Remonstrance"  he  cries: 

Opinion,  let  me  alone :  I  am  not  thine. 
Prim  Creed,  with  categoric  point,  forbear 

To  feature  me  my  Lord  by  rule  and  line. 
Thou  canst  not  measure  Mistress  Nature's  hair, 

Not  one  sweet  inch :  nay,  if  thy  sight  is  sharp, 

Would'st  count  the  strings  upon  an  angel's  harp? 
Forbear,  forbear. 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  113 

Oh,  let  me  love  my  Lord  more  fathom  deep 
Than  there  is  line  to  sound  with :  let  me  love 

My  fellow  not  as  men  that  mandates  keep: 
Yea,  all  that's  lovable,  below,  above, 

That  let  me  love  by  heart,  by  heart,  because 

(Free  from  the  penal  pressure  of  the  laws) 
I  find  it  fair. 

Further,  opinion  is  the  squinting  shadow  that 
darkens  the  banquet  of  love,  and  sunders  men 
from  sweet,  brotherly,  religious  fellowship.  It 
cruelly  says  that 

Religion  hath  blue  eyes  and  yellow  hair: 
She's  Saxon,  all, 

and  the  rest  are  shut  out  of  the  temple  of  faith; 
or  else 

Religion  hath  black  eyes  and  raven  hair: 
Naught  else  is  true, 

and  one  half  the  world  knocks  in  vain  at  the 
temple  doors.  This  is  the  way  of  opinion,  all 
through  history,  ever  dividing  men  into  hostile 
sects,  slaying  love,  and  sending  to  stake  and 
gibbet  and  cross  the  fairest  and  the  best  of  the 
sons  and  daughters  of  time. 

Assassin!  Thief!  Opinion,  'tis  thy  work. 
By  Church,  by  throne,  by  hearth,  by  every  good 

That's  in  the  Town  of  Time,  I  see  thee  lurk, 
And  e'er  some  shadow  stays  where  thou  hast  stood. 

Thou  hand'st  sweet  Socrates  his  hemlock  sour; 

Thou  sav'st  Barabbas  in  that  hideous  hour, 
And  stabb'st  the  good 


SIDNEY  LANIER 

Deliverer  Christ;  them  rack'st  the  souls  of  men; 
Thou  tossest  girls  to  lions  and  boys  to  flames ; 

JThou  hew'st  Crusader  down  by  Saracen; 
Thou  buildest  closets  full  of  secret  shames; 

Indifferent  cruel,  thou  dost  blow  the  blaze 

Round  Ridley  or  Servetus;  all  thy  days 
Smell  scorched. 

So  he  would  be  let  alone  by  this  baseborn  bigot 
Pretender  to  Judgment's  throne,  this  cunning, 
false  claimant  of 

Those  rights  the  true,  true  Son  of  Man  doth  own 
By  Love's  authority. 

Out  of  his  heart  rises  the  cry  to  be  permitted 
to  live  his  life  in  the  larger  freedom  of  love — love 
for  his  kind,  love  for  nature,  love  for  all  the  dear 
things  that  have  come  from  the  hand  of  God, 
and  unrestricted  love  for  the  Lord  of  Love 
himself: 

I  would  thou  left'st  me  free,  to  live  with  love, 
And  faith,  that  through  the  love  of  love  doth  find 

My  Lord's  dear  presence  in  the  stars  above, 
The  clods  below,  the  flesh  without,  the  mind 

Within,  the  bread,  the  tear,  the  smile. 

What  more  definite  statement  of  the  poet's 
passionate  faith  in  the  power  of  love  might  we 
ask  ?  His  only  impatience,  his  only  anger,  is 
against  anything  or  anybody  that  would  limit  in 
any  way  its  free  course.  Out  of  its  deepest 
depths,  steadied  by  its  tender  might,  and  illumi 
nated  by  its  gracious  radiance,  rises  Lanier's 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  115 

faith  in  God — faith  in  God  in  relation  to  his 
world  and  to  the  life  of  man  and  his  final  destiny. 
Under  the  leading  of  such  a  faith,  love  may  go  to 
the  farthest  limit.  And  what  may  be  the  miracu 
lous  reach  of  its  power  is  given  imaginative  treat 
ment  in  that  curious  allegory  of  "How  Love 
Looked  for  Hell."  In  the  poet's  faith,  Hell  is  the 
last  stronghold  which  must  yield  to  the  irresistible 
might  of  Love.  In  this  poem,  therefore,  we  have 
Love's  alleviating,  transforming  energy  stretched 
to  its  last  limit,  and  one  feels  that  even  Love  can 
do  no  more.  It  is  a  fanciful,  perhaps  overwrought 
kind  of  allegory;  yet  the  meaning  is  clear  enough. 
Prince  Love,  the  story  runs,  was  fain  to  travel 
apace  with  those  two  ministers  of  Life,  Mind 
and  Sense.  They  are  to  be  his  guides  along  the 
way,  and  each  would  show  him  the  strangest 
thing  he  desired  to  see.  And  Love  would  glimpse 
that,  to  him,  most  curious  thing — Hell,  with  its 
torture  and  torment  and  hideous  horror  of  punish 
ment.  This  he  had  long  heard  of,  but  could  not 
comprehend.  So  Sense  takes  him  in  charge,  tell 
ing  him  that  Hell  was  found  by  the  Black  River, 
overblown  by  cold,  moldy  winds,  and  crowded 
with  "an  endless  wrack  and  rabble  of  souls," 

Their  eyes  upturned  and  begged  and  burned 
In  brimstone  lakes,  and  a  Hand  above 
Beat  back  the  hands  that  upward  yearned. 


n6  SIDNEY  LANIER 

But  nay,  when  Prince  Love  comes  there  the  very 
magic  of  his  presence  has  wrought  a  wonder: 
instead  of  the  black,  hideous  river  and  rabble  of 
tortured  souls  there  is  a  living  rill,  banked  with  the 
rose  and  the  lily,  the  violet  and  the  fern,  and 

For  lakes  of  pain,  yon  pleasant  plain 
Of  woods  and  grass  and  yellow  grain 

Doth  ravish  the  soul  and  sense : 
And  never  a  sigh  beneath  the  sky, 
And  folk  that  smile  and  gaze  above. 

Thus  love  transmutes  the  pain  and  sorrow  and 
suffering  of  even  the  senses  into  joy,  and  where 
love  is  there  can  be  no  hell. 

However,  Minister  Mind  is  nothing  discour 
aged:  he  can  show  Love  where  Hell  is.  It  is  not 
without,  he  says,  but  lieth  within  the  heart  of 
man;  it  is  discovered  in  the  inner  torture  of  the 
individual  soul.  Off  yonder  under  the  willow 
sits  the  murderer  chained  to  the  corpse  of  the 
enemy  he  has  slain.  There  in  the  conscience- 
stricken  breast  you  will  find  Hell,  urges  Minister 
Mind.  So  Love  wanders  thither,  still  a-seeking. 
But  lo!  again  the  magic  of  his  power  works  a 
wonder.  Instead  of  the  slayer  and  the  slain,  by 
the  gently  hanging  willow  and  the  flowing  stream 
two  spirits  walk  in  friendly,  happy  fellowship. 
Love,  the  reconciler  of  the  bitterest  hates,  has 
been  there,  and  Minister  Mind  "suffered  shame" 
for  his  wrong  report  of  what  and  where  Hell  was. 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  117 

"Now  strange,"  quoth  Sense,  and  "Strange,"  quoth  Mind, 
"We  saw  it,  and  yet  'tis  hard  to  find, 

— But  we  saw  it,"  quoth  Sense  and  Mind. 

But,  under  the  poet's  gospel,  where  Love  is  these 
things  cannot  be — the  Hell  of  hate  and  crime,  of 
sin  and  remorse  and  torment.  Love  is  the  gra 
cious  Prince,  at  whose  healing  touch  these  hideous 
moral  diseases  of  both  Mind  and  Sense  are  cured 
quite,  and  the  tenderness  and  strength  of  spiritual 
health  and  happiness  come  as  if  by  magic. 

But  if  through  love  he  could  find  his  way  to  the 
all-embracing,  all-penetrating  love  of  God;  if  by 
it  he  could  bring  man  and  nature  into  fellowship 
with  himself;  if  looking  with  love's  wistful  eyes 
he  could  see  a  larger  divine  harmony  beneath  all 
the  discords  of  human  experience — a  harmony 
that  somehow,  at  some  time,  a  perfectly  beneficent 
plan  should  cause  to  be  realized  in  the  ever- 
forward-moving  destiny  of  man;  if  under  love's 
tender  healing  the  red  scars  of  hate  and  strife 
should  quite  vanish  and  the  cruel  wars  of  opinion 
yield  to  the  peace  of  God  in  which  all  worshipers 
might  sit  together  in  the  same  temple;  if,  in 
deed,  through  its  miracle-working  might  even  the 
thought  of  the  torment  of  Hell — that  monstrous 
nightmare  which  haunts  the  consciences  of  men 

o 

and  will  not  let  them  sleep  in  their  sins — will  fade 
away,  leaving  not  a  memory  behind — if  love  will 


n8  SIDNEY  LANIER 

do  all  this,  it  is  the  one  cure  for  the  diseases  of 
present  conditions,  social,  industrial,  and  political, 
and  out  of  the  heart  of  love  only  can  the  world  be 
remade  and  the  joy  of  life  brought  to  the  troubled 
sons  of  men. 

I/  It  is  in  "The  Symphony"  that  Lanier  chants 
this  superlative  reach  of  the  power  of  love.  With 
all  the  fervor  and  high  indignation  of  a  prophet 
he  indicts  the  cruelty,  the  brutality,  and  harsh 
unlovingness  of  the  time — the  heartlessness  of 
trade,  its  inhuman  oppression  of  the  poor,  its 
ruthless  slaying  of  tender,  sweet  human  fellowship 
and  service,  its  shutting  man  out  from  the  healing 
influences  of  nature  and  the  Temple  of  Art,  and 
the  shriveling  and  death,  under  its  power,  of  the 
finer  nobilities  and  lofty  chivalries  of  life.  But 
chiefly  Trade,  the  new  idol  of  the  Times,  greedy 
of  material  wealth  and  blindly  careless  of  the 
souls  of  men,  is  the  mighty  force  that  works  so 
much  ill.  All  the  instruments  of  the  great  or 
chestra  in  turn  utter  their  protest  against  the  bitter 
wrongs  of  trade,  of  industrial  conditions,  and  the 
lust  for  gold,  and  chant  the  might  of  love  as 
the  one  antidote  for  the  time's  disease.  This 
is  the  appealing  message  of  the  violin,  the  flute, 
the  horn,  the  hautboy,  and  their  choral  cry  is: 


"O  Trade!  O  Trade!  would  thou  wert  dead! 
The  Time  needs  heart — 'tis  tired  of  head." 


. 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  119 

In  unison  they  take  up  the  cause  of  the  poor — of 
the  poor  who  stand 

Wedged  by  the  pressing  of  Trade's  hand 
Against  an  inward-opening  door 
That  pressure  tightens  evermore: 
They  sigh  a  monstrous  foul-air  sigh 
For  the  outside  leagues  of  liberty, 
Where  Art,  sweet  lark,  translates  the  sky. 

"In  the  same  old  year-long,  drear-long  way,"  they 
toil  and  moil  in  mill  and  mine;  like  beasts  "they 
hunger  and  eat  and  die";  and  we  may  say  that 
all  "the  world's  a  sty,"  and  "swinehood  hath  no 
remedy."  But  nay;  under  the  prompting  of 
love  we  hear  the  voice  of  the  Lord  of  Love,  in 
spite  of  Trade's  preaching  and  practice,  saying: 

"Men  shall  not  live  by  bread  alone, 
But  all  that  cometh  from  the  Throne." 

In  this  thought  the  problem  is  to  be  solved  and 
the  ills  cured.  The  solution  and  the  curing  are 
not  to  be  had  so  much  from  the  wise  in  head  as 
from  the  loving  in  heart: 

Vainly  might  Plato's  brain  revolve  it: 
Plainly  the  heart  of  a  child  could  solve  it. 

We  must  heed   the   voice  of  the  most  loving  of 

men — he  who  said : 

"Never  shalt  thou  the  heavens  see, 
Save  as  a  little  child  thou  be." 

And  love,  then,  the  poet  repeats  again  and  again, 
is  the  one  thing  needful,  as  he  chants  in  winning 


I2O  SIDNEY  LANIER 

phrase  the  divinely  approved  conception  that  it 
is  out  of  the  heart  that  the  issues  of  life  are: 

Sweet  friends, 

Man's  love  ascends 
To  finer  and  diviner  ends 
Than  man's  mere  thought  e'er  comprehends. 

But  it  is  to  be  the  love  that  Christ  himself 
brought,  the  love  of  which  he  is  the  source  and 
pattern.  He  gave  it  its  nature,  its  depth,  and 
breadth  when  he  said,  "Love  thy  neighbor": 

Then  first  the  bounds  of  neighborhood  outspread 
Beyond  all  confines  of  old  ethnic  dread. 
Vainly  the  Jew  might  wag  his  covenant  head : 
''All  men  are  neighbors,'"  so  the  sweet  Voice  said. 
So,  when  man's  arms  had  circled  all  men's  race, 
The  liberal  compass  of  his  warm  embrace 
Stretched  bigger  yet  in  the  dark  bounds  of  space ; 
With  hands  a-grope  he  felt  smooth  Nature's  grace, 
Drew  her  to  breast  and  kissed  her  sweetheart  face: 
Yea,  man  found  neighbors  in  great  hills  and  trees 
And  streams  and  clouds  and  suns  and  birds  and  bees, 
And  throbbed  with  neighbor-loves  in  loving  these. 

And  gloriously  in  the  end  all  the  mighty  sym 
phony  chants  the  power  of  this  love,  and  all  the 
clanging  discords  of  life  are  hushed.  If  cruel 
wrong  and  oppression,  if  hate  and  inhuman 
unbrotherliness,  are  to  disappear  from  the  world 
of  men,  if  even  the  hard,  soulless  materialism  of 
trade  is  to  be  spiritualized,  it  must  be  through  the 
presence  of  the  Incarnate  Love  working  in  the 
heart  of  man.  Hear,  then,  the  symphonic  har- 


THE  GOSPEL  OF  LOVE  121 

mony  as  all   the  instruments  of  divine  melody 
blend  together: 

Life!  Life!  thou  sea-fugue,  writ  from  east  to  west, 

Love,  love  alone  can  pore 

On  thy  dissolving  score 

Of  harsh  half-phrasings, 
Blotted  ere  writ, 

And  double  erasings 
Of  chords  most  fit. 
Yea,  Love,  sole  music-master  blest, 
May  read  thy  weltering  palimpsest. 
To  follow  Time's  dying  melodies  through, 
And  never  to  lose  the  old  in  the  new, 
And  ever  to  solve  the  discords  true — 

Love  alone  can  do. 

And  ever  Love  hears  the  poor-folks'  crying, 
And  ever  Love  hears  the  women's  sighing, 
And  ever  sweet  knighthood's  death-defying, 
And  ever  wise  childhood's  deep  implying, 
But  never  a  trader's  glozing  and  lying. 

And  yet  shall  Love  himself  be  heard, 
Though  long  deferred,  though  long  deferred: 
O'er  the  modern  waste  a  dove  hath  whirred: 
Music  is  Love  in  search  of  a  word. 


VIII 

THE  CRYSTAL  CHRIST 

Now,  all  this  high  passion  of  love  must  attach 
itself  to  a  reality — indeed,  must  grow  out  of  a 
reality.  This  confident  faith  in  its  gracious  yet 
irresistible  power  must  root  itself  in  the  clear-seen 
vision  of  that  power  living  and  walking  among 
men.  It  is  not  enough  to  think  of  God  as  the 
God  of  love,  and  to  conceive  of  the  law  of  life  as 
the  law  of  love;  it  is  not  enough  to  feel  that  the 
sad  old  earth  needs  heart,  not  head,  to  cure  its 
ills — its  ills  of  politics,  of  trade,  of  society,  of 
opinion,  of  wrong,  of  sin.  All  this  may  be  but 
an  application  of  intellectual  ideas  and  spiritual 
ideals  to  human  conditions,  exceptionally  beauti 
ful  in  themselves  and  illustrating  the  lofty  aiming 
of  the  poet's  thought  and  the  pure  spirituality  of 
the  poet's  character.  But  he  did  not  stop  with 
this.  He  who  saw  the  holiness  of  beauty  saw  also 
the  beauty  of  holiness — saw  it  in  its  perfect  incar 
nation  in  the  Christ  himself.  To  him  has  the 
poet's  thought  and  aspiration  been  leading;  in 
him  has  his  faith  fixed  itself;  from  him  has  pro 
ceeded  his  gospel  of  love.  Lanier  was  of  those 
who,  turning  from  a  faith  "all  vague  and  un- 


THE  CRYSTAL  CHRIST  123 

sweet"  because  it  centered  nowhere,  saw  with 
unblurred  eyes  that  the  Word  had  flesh  and 
dwelt  and  dwells  among  us,  and  we  may  see  his 
glory.  It  was  in  the  Love  that  passeth  all  un 
derstanding  that  his  soul  rested  and  his  thought 
of  God  and  man  and  nature  found  its  chief  com 
fort  and  satisfaction. 

The  Christ,  then,  represented  the  consumma 
tion  of  Lanier's  deepest  religious  thought,  the 
highest  reach  of  his  spiritual  aspiration,  and  even 
received  the  most  generous  response  of  his  artis 
tic  sensibility.  But  it  should  be  insisted  that  this 
attitude  of  his  was  no  mere  mood  of  an  artist, 
appreciating  the  unapproachable  loveliness  of 
Christ's  matchless  character.  There  have  been 
those,  smeared  in  the  mire  of  vice  and  corroded 
with  hideous  sin,  as  Oscar  Wilde,  for  example, 
whose  keen  sense  of  beauty  has  paid  ecstatic 
tribute  to  the  unflecked  fairness  of  the  perfect 
character  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  With  Lanier, 
we  must  believe,  it  is  a  far  profounder  emotion 
than  an  aesthetic  response  to  the  radiant  beauty 
of  unalloyed  holiness.  Of  course,  this  is  not  to 
say  that  there  was  not  something  of  this  element 
in  Lanier's  worshipful  look  toward  the  Master's 
completely  rounded  goodness.  Artist  that  he  was, 
the  poet  must  have  caught  much  of  the  merely 
aesthetic  significance  of  that  flawless  life,  illus- 


124  SIDNEY  LANIER 

trating  as  it  did  the  shining  heights  of  moral 
attainment.  Nevertheless,  he  gave  to  the  Christ 
his  tribute  of  adoration,  worship,  love,  and 
this  tribute  was  the  outward  expression  of 
a  faith  securely  anchored  in  the  Incarnate 
Love.  If,  therefore,  his  attitude  was  naturally 
artistic,  it  was  more  truly,  more  essentially 
religious,  or  spiritual.  The  beauty,  goodness, 
truth,  wisdom,  and  love  fleshed  in  Christ  com 
pletely  satisfied  his  own  soul's  passion  for  these 
high  things  of  the  moral  life. 

It  is  in  the  poem  entitled  "The  Crystal"  that 
Lanier  reveals  the  climax  of  his  thought  in  an 
interpretation  of  Christ.  At  the  hour  of  mid 
night,  "truth's  unlocking  time,"  far  within  his 
spirit  he  hears  the  roll  and 

The  great  soft  rumble  of  the  course  of  things. 

He  calls  the  muster  roll  of  all  the  great  ones  of 
earth — 

companies  of  governor-spirits  grave, 
Bards,  and  old  bringers-down  of  flaming  news 
From  steep-wall'd  heavens,  holy  malcontents, 
Sweet  seers,  and  stellar  visionaries,  all 
That  brood  about  the  skies  of  poesy. 

Yet,  after  looking  at  each  with  loving  eyes  and  a 
heart  swift  to  pardon  every  fault,  he  finds 

not  one 

But  hath  some  heinous  freckle  of  the  flesh 
Upon  his  shining  cheek,  not  one  but  winks 


THE  CRYSTAL  CHRIST  125 

His  ray,  opaqued  with  intermittent  mist 
Of  defect;  yea,  you  masters  all  must  ask 
Some  sweet  forgiveness,  which  we  leap  to  give, 
We  lovers  of  you,  heavenly-glad  to  meet 
Your  largesse  so  with  love,  and  interplight 
Your  geniuses  with  our  mortalities. 

Shakespeare,  Homer,  Socrates,  Dante,  Buddha, 
Milton,  ^Eschylus,  Lucretius,  Caedmon,  Aurelius, 
a  Kempis,  Langland,  Emerson,  Keats,  Tenny 
son — ye  all  have 

your  little  mole  that  marks 
You  brother  and  your  kinship  seals  to  man. 

They  each  are  of  the  fellowship  of  those  who 
sin;  they  are  human  with  all  their  inspired  endow 
ment  of  genius.  But  here  is  One  upon  whose 
immaculateness  there  is  no  soil  or  fleck  or  stain. 
He  stands  apart  in  the  perfect  purity  of  his  divine 
holiness.  No  need  of  pardon  here;  to  his  com 
plete  goodness  mind  and  heart  and  soul  render 
their  homage  of  worship : 

But  Thee,  but  Thee,  O  sovereign  Seer  of  time, 

But  Thee,  O  poets'  Poet,  Wisdom's  Tongue, 

But  Thee,  O  man's  best  Man,  O  love's  best  Love, 

O  perfect  life  in  perfect  labor  writ, 

O  all  men's  Comrade,  Servant,  King,  or  Priest, — 

What  if  or  yet,  what  mole,  what  flaw,  what  lapse, 

What  least  defect  or  shadow  of  defect, 

What  rumor,  tattled  by  an  enemy, 

Of  inference  loose,  what  lack  of  grace 

Even  in  torture's  grasp,  or  sleep's,  or  death's, — 

Oh,  what  amiss  may  I  forgive  in  Thee, 

Jesus,  good  Paragon,  thou  Crystal  Christ? 


IX 

THE  MESSAGE 

IN  this  conception  of  the  Crystal  Christ  we 
have  come  to  the  goal  of  the  poet's  faith,  the 
finest  spiritual  note,  perhaps,  in  all  his  singing, 
the  noblest  chanting  of  his  credo,  and  the  centering 
of  his  thought  of  the  highest  good  and  the  largest 
love  in  Him  who  was  the  very  Beauty  of  Holiness 
and  the  Love  of  Love.  To  this  end  have  all  the 
roads  of  his  interpretation  of  life  led  him;  from 
the  light  of  the  personality  of  the  Christ  gleams 
the  radiance  that  has  shone  in  the  singularly 
beautiful  character  of  the  man  and  the  utter 
spirituality  of  his  message.  This  radiance  noth 
ing  was  able  to  dim;  it  illuminated  the  dark 
places  of  his  personal  experience;  by  it  he  saw  his 
way  in  the  night  of  the  time's  unfaith;  it  was  the 
polestar  by  which  he  guided  his  ship  of  life,  beat 
upon  by  the  stormy  headwinds  of  untoward  con 
ditions  and  all  but  twisted  at  times  from  its  true 
course  by  the  strong  cross-currents  of  circum 
stance;  and  this,  too,  was  the  master  truth  of 
all  his  seeking. 

Thus  in  our  search  for  the  spiritual  meaning  of 

Lanier's  message  to  the  world  we  have  found  it 

126 


THE  MESSAGE  127 

in  the  purity  of  his  soul,  in  the  cheerful  man 
liness  and  high  nobility  of  his  character,  and 
in  his  knightly  struggle  against  disease  and  condi 
tions  that  tended  to  hold  him  back  and  retard 
his  development.  Read  from  this  standpoint 
alone,  the  story  of  his  life  is  rich  in  the  imperish 
able  wealth  of  human  virtue,  and  is  a  romance 
of  character  that  touches  with  charm  and  even 
glory  the  history  of  American  letters.  It  does 
more  than  this:  the  mere  record  of  this  man's 
life  has  also  the  inestimable  value  of  transferring 
something  of  his  own  unbending  yet  winning 
morality  to  the  character  of  those  who  thus  come 
into  vital  contact  with  him  and  what  he  was.  A 
precious  possession,  therefore,  is  the  man  Sidney 
Lanier  in  the  history  of  American  life,  and  it  is 
good  to  think  that  this  life  has  been  able  to  grow 
such  as  he. 

Then,  too,  we  shall  gladly  remind  ourselves 
afresh,  as  a  part  of  his  spiritual  message,  not  only 
of  the  beauty  of  his  life  and  of  the  inspiring 
chivalry  of  his  character,  but  also  of  his  unfalter 
ing  loyalty  to  his  art  and  of  his  unshaken  fidelity 
to  ethical  and  spiritual  ideals  and  principles  as 
giving  the  real  value  to  all  art.  Measured  from 
a  utilitarian  standard,  it  may  have  been  an  unwise 
thing  for  our  poet  to  have  committed  himself  so 
unreservedly  to  the  pursuit  of  mere  beauty  in  the 


128  SIDNEY  LANIER 

realm  of  poetry  and  music.  This  would  not 
bring  food  and  raiment  and  shelter  for  wife  and 
little  ones.  Still  it  was  a  great  thing;  all  will 
agree  that,  the  committal  once  made,  this  reli 
gious  consecration  of  Lanier's  to  a  faith  in  the 
power  of  music  and  poetry  to  make  life  sweeter 
and  to  direct  men  along  the  road  that  leads  to 
God  was  an  inspiringly  noble  thing,  and  as  such 
is  a  contribution  to  the  spiritual  possessions  of 
the  race. 

But  greater  even  than  this:  he  sought  with  all 
the  strength  and  ardor  of  his  soul  to  hold  in 
indissoluble  wedlock  beauty  and  morality,  love 
liness  of  form  and  holiness  of  content.  In  an 
age  when  art  was  peering  with  pruriently  curious 
gaze  into  the  hidden  sewers  of  human  experience 
and  character,  and,  without  blinking  its  eyes  or 
holding  its  nose,  was  uncovering  the  foulness  and 
stench  of  a  degenerate  morality,  excusing  itself, 
withal,  with  the  cry  of  art  for  art's  sake,  and  the 
necessity  of  a  scientific  recording  of  life,  it  is  a 
joy  to  the  soul  and  a  tonic  to  the  whole  moral 
nature  to  hear  Lanier  pleading  for  the  holiness  of 
beauty  as  well  as  for  the  beauty  of  holiness.  At  a 
time  when  the  literature  of  the  moral  dissecting 
room  and  spiritual  hospital  was  darkening  the 
earth  with  the  philosophy  of  spiritual  disease  and 
death,  it  is  good  to  have  Lanier's  voice  proclaim- 


THE  MESSAGE  129 

ing  in  verse  and  prose  that  that  art  is  not  only 
unwholesome,  but  that  also  it  dies  swiftly  out  of 
the  memory  of  men,  which  has  not  before  it  the 
highest  ethical  ideals,  and  which  is  not  informed 
through  and  through  with  spiritual  values.  For 
such  ideals  and  such  values  winningly  he  pleaded, 
in  season  and  out;  and  so  long  as  these  things 
shall  be  held  precious  among  men,  so  long  will 
they  count  the  poet's  interpretation  among  their 
spiritual  treasures. 

Moreover,  in  an  age  of  doubt  and  unfaith,  in 
an  age  when  the  lamp  of  the  spirit  burned  languid 
and  low,  when  men  found  it  hard  to  see  God  in 
the  darkness  and  tangle  and  confusion  of  things, 
he  at  least  kept  his  faith  steady  and  sure,  the 
light  of  his  spirit  suffered  no  dimness,  and  he  saw 
God  in  the  individual  life  and  in  the  larger  course 
of  human  history.  His  way  of  going  was  no 
blind,  aimless  groping  in  the  starless  night  of 
pessimism.  It  led  rather  out  into  the  broad, 
open  path  toward  God — the  path  lit  by  the  love 
and  light  of  the  Divine  Father's  purpose  and 
providence.  As  he  walked  it,  if  he  did  not  always 
understand,  through  faith  he  could  at  least  find 
his  way  and  trust  the  larger  Hope.  It  was  God's 
world  anyway  through  which  he  was  journeying, 
and  in  this  conviction  he  interpreted  nature  and 
art  and  human  life  in  all  its  relationships.  So  his 


130  SIDNEY  LANIER 

poetry,  whatever  its  value  as  a  purely  artistic 
product,  is  rich  in  nourishment  for  the  soul 
because,  indeed,  it  is  the  fair  flower  of  a  soul 
rooted  in  the  eternal  verities  of  faith. 

But  he  saw  God  not  only  as  the  Divine  Mind 
shaping  and  directing  the  complicated  forces 
of  human  life,  individual  and  collective;  he  saw 
him  also  as  the  God  of  Love,  and  hence  love 
as  the  one  solvent  for  all  problems.  So  the 
poet  took  to  his  own  heart  the  fair  and  sweet 
nobilities  of  life  and  nature;  under  the  wonder 
working  power  of  love  the  ills  of  the  world  might 
vanish,  its  diseases  be  cured,  its  sorrows  healed, 
and  war  and  hate  and  cruel  wrong  disappear.  In 
this  sense,  through  the  beautiful  medium  of  his 
art,  he  becomes  a  valiant  apostle  of  the  gospel  of 
love,  calling  men  not  only  to  repentance  but  also 
to  the  Crystal  Christ — he  who  was  all  holiness  and 
all  love. 

Finally,  when  •  there  rises  before  us  the  fair 
chivalry  of  Lanier's  life  and  character,  his  lofty 
conception  of  his  art  and  its  mission,  his  unwaver 
ing  devotion  and  consecration  to  it,  his  fusing  into 
it  the  noblest  ethical  ideals,  the  shining  heights  to 
which  his  faith  led  him,  the  sweet  and  winsome 
gospel  of  love  which  he  would  translate  into  all 
things,  we  have  not  even  yet  quite  summed  up 
the  spiritual  meaning  of  his  message.  We  shall 


THE  MESSAGE  131 

be  far  from  saying  enough  if  we  fail  once  again  to 
bring  before  us  the  unflagging  ardor  of  his  aspira 
tion  and  the  constant  presence  of  an  upward- 
tending  energy  that  throbs  in  all  he  did  and  said 
and  thought.  He  may  not  have  expressed  any 
profoundly  great  thoughts;  he  may  have  been 
far  from  creating  any  supremely  great  poem;  as 
far  as  actual  achievement  is  concerned  he  may 
have  been  but  a  thinker  about  art,  a  man  of  keen 
artistic  temperament,  and  no  artist.  Yet,  after 
all  has  been  said  and  every  allowance  been  made, 
no  one  who  touches  even  superficially  the  man 
and  his  poetry  can  fail  to  feel  the  inspiring 
potency  of  the  upward  look  that  shines  from 
Lanier's  eyes.  One  knows  that  he  lived  for  the 
best,  strove  for  the  best,  and  aspired  to  the  best. 
He  is  no  man  of  low  degree,  walking  contentedly 
the  commonplace  paths  along  the  mere  levels  of 
life.  His  face  is  toward  the  heights  always,  and 
the  road  he  is  on  is  an  ascending  one.  And  this 
impression  of  spiritual  uplook  and  uplift,  of  the 
ever-aspiring  energy  of  a  soul  seeking  to  realize 
the  very  truth  of  God,  is  that  virtue  in  the  spir 
itual  message  of  Sidney  Lanier  upon  which  all 
the  world  will  agree.  He  missed,  no  doubt,  the 
perfect  which  he  sought;  but  we  are  sure  that 
his  eye  was  ever  set  upon  it,  that  it  was  ever 
present  in  his  thought,  that  it  ever  disturbed  his 


132  SIDNEY  LANIER 

spirit  with  its  divine  discontent.  His  hand,  we 
know,  was  no  "low-pulsed  forthright  craftsman's," 
and  we  know  that  his  reach  exceeded  his  grasp. 
As  we  think  of  his  forward-striving  manliness,  of 
his  unbending  nobility  of  life  and  purpose,  of  his 
passionate  love  of  all  things  fair  and  good,  of  his 
beautiful  and  lofty  conception  of  his  art  and  its 
mission,  of  his  heartening  faith  in  the  God  of 
Love  as  well  as  the  God  of  Power,  may  we  not, 
in  conclusion,  call  him 

One  who  never  turned  his  back,  but  marched  breast  forward, 

Never  doubted  clouds  would  break, 
Never  dreamed,  though  right  were  worsted,  wrong  would 

triumph, 

Held  we  fall  to  rise,  are  baffled  to  fight  betterf 
Sleep  to  wake? 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  AT  LOS  ANGELES 

THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 


i  JAN  2  7 1950 

'OCT  24  19W> 
REC'O  IWLD 


NOY2    I960 


PS 

2213  Snyder  - 
S67  Sidney  Lanier. 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


JAW  1 7  1950 


- 


i*IM  IBM  III  II  HIM  UNI  III  ||  Mill  HIM  HI  1 1  III  ||  III 

A  A      000034499    4 


PS 

2213 
S67 


